Top 250! Are you kidding?

Rating: 1/10 (5 December 2007)

This movie is a total failure. Totally devoid of any cinematic merits.Waste of money and talent. Seriously, I struggle to find in it just a single redeeming feature.
First, the script and structure. It's 1 hour long exposition when a viewer is just bombarded with very thinly motivated events. Frank Lucas is the bodyguard, driver and sometime enforcer of some crime boss, then his boss dies. Lucas makes a phone call to Thailand and goes there and gets wads of horse. All of sudden without any interference from drug-overlords he becomes a major purveyor of best heroin, which sells for half-market price. At the same time, a story told million times before about a good cop within corrupt police environment, who has some family troubles. Secondly, the acting. Washington just can't play mean types. He lacks a mean streak in him. It's simply unconvincing, especially when in crisis he starts mumbling something frenetically. And this guy shoots a competing gangster in the face in the middle of busy street (again without any consequences). And Crowe just doing his Crowe thing - nervous wrecked action man thing. Thirdly, pretentious attempts to give the whole thing some historical context. Constant reminders of Vietnam war going on in the background. It's so clichÃ©. Was it so necessary to pipe this thing every 15 min or so of valuable screen time? And last but not least, putting an air of deep message behind this razzle-dazzle with statements about America, American dream, etc. It's been done many many times before with much more effective results.