American Gangster

Here's a startlingly original true-life story told in an oddly unoriginal way. And that attempt at instant classic status in the title doesn't quite convince. It's got no more dark grandeur than American Idol.

The film is about the 1970s Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts, the straight-arrow cop who took him down. Lucas's career is heavily pregnant with one irresistible metaphor; he claimed to have directly imported high-grade heroin into the United States from the far east during the Vietnam war, hiding the drugs in the flag-bedecked coffins of fallen American troops - containers that, naturally, no one dared touch. Criminals tend also to be liars, of course, and it is possible that this particular juicy detail may be exaggerated or just invented, but director Ridley Scott has taken the inner-city urban myth at face value in this muscular period drama starring Denzel Washington as New York's emperor of smack, and Russell Crowe as the rumpled officer coming after him.

Wide collars and centre-partings are much in evidence; President Nixon is always making jowly appearances on TV sets; and Steve Zaillian's script has Roberts, while giving chase to a cash-laden car, shouting to his own driver: "Follow the money!" in sly tribute to the Watergate catchphrase. There's so much sweaty, pugnacious masculinity in the air, the testosterone is condensing and running down the windows in rivulets.

Scott has shuffled the classic scenes and tropes of the gangster movie and dealt them like a deck of playing cards. There's a big face-off between old-school bad guy and old-school good guy in the manner of Michael Mann. There are nightclub scenes and epiphanic glimpses of beautiful women, blasts of pop music, and plenty of nostalgic voiceover-montage, explaining how the wiseguys' scams worked, in the manner of Scorsese. And, further back than that, there are churchgoing gangsters presiding over pious family events, intercut with horrible shootings in the style of Coppola. There is even a bit of lachrymose brass on the soundtrack, which somehow makes you think of oranges rolling all over the sidewalk.

It's not cliched exactly; it's just very, very familiar. And the one part that might make it unique, make it fascinating - the Vietnamese connection, and military personnel arranging to stuff drugs into GIs' coffins - all this is hardly touched on at all. The film stays very much on the familiar mean streets of New York City. When Washington's frowning mobster makes his one visit to Thailand, meeting with the local grower, he concludes his business with his characteristic grin - "My maa-a-n!" - but adds that he doesn't want to drag his ass out there ever again. Clearly, Ridley Scott feels much the same way.

Villain and cop are both outsiders. As a black man, Lucas is the underdog, massively patronised and then hated by the white Mafia he outflanks. Roberts is Jewish, an identity signalled by just two touches: a star-of-David neckchain glimpsed while he rows with his estranged wife near the start, and a white bigot calling him a "kike" near the end. Whatever their actual reputation for anti-semitism, the Harlem African-Americans voice no such slurs on Roberts' religion in this film, preserving the important solidarity between the two men. It's not just a question of two alpha-males grudgingly respecting each other; Roberts wants to arrest Lucas so that he can expose the massive network of corrupt police officers who leech on Lucas's drug money. That may well have been precisely his motive in real life; here it makes for a questionable moral equivalence between these two charismatic street-warriors. The real villains are obviously supposed to be the hapless Italian-Americans and one straightforwardly horrible bent copper, played by Josh Brolin.

What is disappointing is Washington himself. He doesn't seem to relax and enjoy himself in the role, or even inhabit it very satisfyingly. He never has the menace of his dirty cop in Training Day, and we don't see anything like the transformation from street-hustler to leader in Malcolm X. That shoulder-shimmying swagger is rarely seen, and the brand-classic robes of "American Gangster" sit on him heavily. He looks as though he is trying to be that most un-American of things: royalty. Crowe, by contrast, is looser, paunchier, feistier; his suits are cheaper, fit less well and he doesn't give a damn.

There is one very good moment. Cautious Lucas can hardly contain his rage at the flashy, attention-grabbing clothes being worn by his excitable younger brother Huey (Chiwetel Ejiofor); he tells him they scream "arrest me". But then, in a moment of weakness, he agrees to wear a showy chinchilla fur coat and matching hat to an Ali fight - an outfit picked out for him by his wife, and which is so colourful you might assume it's for her, not him. Against his better judgment, he wears it, and catastrophically attracts the attention of cops both clean and dirty. It is the beginning of the end, and, furious at himself, Lucas throws the staggeringly expensive garment into the fire. But the event never packs the punch that it should have done.

Just occasionally, with a kind of guilty start, Scott shows the victims of drugs: poor black people living in squalor. But proposing the gangster as a scary but somehow thrillingly real American design classic is uneasy, and uninspired.