American Gangster an Oscar shoo-in

By Mina Hochberg | amNewYork Movie Critic
November 2, 2007


Remember the theme song to "American Gangster" because you'll probably be hearing it a lot at the Oscars next year. Ridley Scott's spellbinding epic is one of the most noteworthy movies to come out of the big studios this year. Set in the early 1970s, the film chronicles the legendary rise of real-life Harlem drugpin Frank Lucas, whose maximum-strength heroin, called Blue Magic, proliferated the streets with twice the potency at half the price.

Inspired by a New York magazine profile of Lucas in 2000, "Gangster" is not so much about drug culture as it is about the making of a fierce American entrepreneur. Lucas, who worked for years as the "driver" for a crime boss, used his go-getter initiative to travel to Vietnam in the middle of the war and personally broker a deal to import pure heroin via military transport. By cutting out the middle man, he crafted a business plan that landed him a gold mine.

Denzel Washington inhabits Lucas with the kind of uncanny ease that wins awards. Lucas is mild-mannered and unassuming -- well, except for the occasional outburst where he shoots a guy in the forehead in broad daylight or smashes another guy's head in with a piano lid at a party. He wears tasteful suits and takes his mother to church. He lives by principles -- principles that allow for maiming and killing, but principles nonetheless.