Ridley Scott’s New York crime story American Gangster is a cocksure upstart that has swaggered onto the scene, confident that it can take its place at the table with the big boys.

Like Denzel Washington’s character, the heroin kingpin Frank Lucas, this is a film that knows that it is going to be compared with and judged next to the big names of Italian organised crime. With that in mind, Scott directs with guns blazing and chooses an audaciously proprietorial title that lays claim to the legacy of the American Mafia movie. This is the natural heir, we’re encouraged to believe, to those classics of the 1970s and 1980s that set the benchmark for macho, bloody urban cinema.

While it’s unfair to criticise a film for what it is not, it should be noted that this is no Goodfellas, no Godfather and no Once Upon a Time in America. For all its brio and scale, American Gangster is not in the same league. That said, while it’s not great, it’s pretty damn good.

Washington’s Lucas dresses like a bank manager, acts like a pillar of the community and dominates the East Coast heroin import trade from the late 1960s until the end of the Vietnam War. He’s a mild-mannered man who cracks heads like conkers and rages at his staff when they incorrectly try to remove the blood from his alpaca rug by rubbing rather than dabbing.

On the other side of the law is Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), an honest cop in a city where there seem to be as many crooks with badges as there are on the streets. Roberts once made the terrible faux pas of handing in $1 million in unmarked notes and now his name is mud with his fellow officers. How can they trust a guy that honest? Roberts heads up a new unit charged with going after the men at the top of the drug chain.

The film is very much about these two personalities. Unlike, say, Goodfellas, American Gangster has few meaty peripheral characters. Chiwetel Ejiofor makes an impression as Lucas’s misguided younger brother, but predominantly the supporting cast are fillers.

For most of the lengthy running time, Lucas and Roberts exist in separate worlds. These are delineated strikingly by the director of photography, Harris Savides, who also shot this year’s other impressive 1970s-set police procedural, Zodiac. Roberts shuffles around in a grubby, nicotine-stained twilight world, wading through junk-food cartons on stake-outs. Lucas, meanwhile, is surrounded by beauty, his power and influence brought into sharp focus by the paparazzi flashbulbs that follow his famous friends.

Both Washington and Crowe turn in impressive performances. Crowe’s Roberts is brawling, shabby and charismatic; Washington’s Lucas is a cashmere-covered menace. They are worthy adversaries. It’s perhaps a pity that we have to wait so long into the film for them to finally face each other.

American Gangster
18, 156mins

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