The Rise And Fall Of Empires

Rating: 8/10 (26 April 2008)

This is one of the better "ganster/mob" films that I've seen in recent years, basically because of the way the movie manages to blend personal story lines in an unromanticized way into the grimy reality of life in the underworld.
The movie revolves around the story of Frank Lucas (an excellent performance by Denzel Washington) who starts off the story as the driver to one of Harlem's leading gangsters and traces his rise to the head of New York City's drug trafficking lords. As with many "mob" stories, the truly frightening thing in many ways is how normal this guy's life is away from "work." He's got a mom who loves him and who he takes to church every week, a beautiful wife who seems totally in love with him, a nice home, powerful and apparently legitimate friends and he runs his business - his drug business, and a legitimate club that presumably helps to account for some of his money. Starting off with basically nothing after the mobster he works for dies, Lucas ruthlessly rises to the top in a businesslike fashion, by importing high quality drugs from Thailand, using US military planes as transports.
Russell Crowe on the other hand is Detective Richie Roberts, an honest cop - one of the few apparently, and ostracized by other cops for turning in almost a million dollars rather than keeping it. One of the most memorable lines in the movie belongs to his partner (played by John Ortiz) who says by way of warning what awaits them on the force and in an attempt to convince Roberts that they should keep the money "cops who turn in a million dollars also turn in other cops." (In other words, there's not a cop on the force who'll trust you enough to work with you after this.) When that prediction turns out to be true, Roberts ends up heading a federal investigation into drug trafficking, and Lucas becomes his chief prey.
The story of dishonest cops, mainly represented by Det. Trupo (Josh Brolin) provides the continuous backdrop to the movie, and it's very well done. It's a shocking note at the end of the movie that three quarters of the NYC Drug Enforcement Agency ended up being charged in the federal investigation.
This is a very good blending together of these three stories, based on fact and brilliantly acted by Washington and Crowe, as well as the supporting cast. It's violent, but not gratuitously so. The last bit of the movie (featuring the co-operation between Lucas and Roberts after Lucas is caught) seems to fly by a little bit too fast, and one of the closing captions tells us that Lucas was released from prison in 1991, but doesn't tell us what he's been doing since then, which I would have liked to have found out - did he go back to the life, or did he stay straight? Aside from that, though, this is a very good movie that will not disappoint. 8/10