Denzel Washington deals drama as NYC drug lord in American Gangster

Consider the bitter irony of it all. Frank Lucas, the once-notorious drug kingpin who blasts the “Thug Life” fetishism of the gangster rap era as “bullshit,” is now to be immortalized in American Gangster, a studio pic that’s being heavily marketed to exactly that generation of “bling” heads.

In an attempt to draw every doragged Scarface worshipper to theatres, the film dangles such household names as T.I., Common, and RZA amongst its cast, and has apparently “inspired” the Jigga Man himself to record a complimentary soundtrack. Though he may not like it, Lucas’s legacy is being marketed to the very generation that irks him: the kids who worship the shameless flaunting of money and violence in America’s new corporate-sponsored “gangsterism.” Call it bittersweet justice, since, after all, gangster- crazed America is something he—along with fellow O.G. Nicky Barnes—helped design.

However, Ridley Scott’s glossy, schematically-drawn American Gangster makes it clear that while this new America is a product of the likes of Frank Lucas, the entrepreneurial businessman himself came from the dark womb of corporate America.

Tracking the large-scale dope supplier’s rise to power during the turbulent late-sixties/early-seventies, American Gangster depicts the cold and calculated Lucas (played by an impeccably smooth Denzel Washington) as a man who made a name for himself on 116th Steet, but could have just as easily done the same on Wall Street. Lucas has acumen for branding, pricing, and cutting down the competition so that they too end up buying from him.

If Lucas gives back to the community like his mentor, Bumpy Johnson, regularly did, it’s only to keep his public image on the upand- up while he bleeds the city dry with his 10-per-cent-pure heroin (a product that no doubt cost a number of lives to deliver). Like America, Lucas had a particular investment in Vietnam: the steady supply of caskets for dead soldiers transports his heroin supply from East Asia.

Scott and his team (with due credit to writer Steven Zaillian) develop a symbiotic relationship between Lucas and his country while paying close attention to New York’s climate in the seventies. The heroin epidemic was just one of several plaguing the U.S., and Lucas and his compatriots were not the only ones supplying it. This was, after all, the period of the French Connection scandal, when corrupt SIU officers used their unlimited resources not to shutdown the drug trade but to compete in it—an ordeal the filmmakers aptly play out against Lucas’s enterprise.

Amidst all this is Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe’s outrageously version of Frank Serpico), the pariah of the police force. Roberts has the far-from-glamorous task of bringing Lucas down—a job all the more difficult since half of the justice department is on the crime boss’s payroll. As Roberts observes, “If we stop bringing dope into this country, about a hundred thousand people are going to be out of a job.”

If this film doesn’t strain your moral fibres—it paints a somewhat alluring picture of the murderous Frank Lucas—don’t feel bad. America felt the same allure. The very judge that put Lucas away described him as “easy to like,” and most followers of gangster rap (as well as the corporations that neatly package their sonic addictions) have ingrained the crime figure into the consciousness of popular culture.