Promises a lot, delivers very little

Rating: 7/10 (7 November 2007)

Oscar season is here and the first real major film that wants to challenge for this years Best Film award is here.
Oh boy has the marketing machine worked its magic here. This film wants to be taken seriously, as seriously as The Godfather or Goodfellas, from everything from the slick trailers to the simple yet stylish movie posters and even intro credits.
The main selling point of this film are the lead actors Denzel Washington and Rusell Crowe.
I'll drop my first humdinger by saying I don;t think these actors are anything special nor are they even in the top few actors around at the current time.
Rusell Crowe has only ever impressed me in one film. The best film he has been in was LA Confidential, but that wasn't really down to him. In that film he played something of an oaf with little emotion. In Romper Stomer he played something of a thug. And in his award winning performance in Gladiator he played something, yes you guessed it, an oaf and a thug. I should add in here that Gladiator is in my opinion an utterly awful and overrated film with little substance. If American Gangster was to go on and win the Oscar for Best Film like Gladiator did then it would only cost the Academy Awards the little bit of credibility they have left IMO.
It is not all bad though because Crowe did put in a performance to be remembered in the film 'The Insider' which I thought was actually VERY good and easily the best performance I have seen form him (Beautiful Mind included).
Next we have Denzel Washington. An actor who IMO was nothing special. He then won an Oscar for Tarining Day and was propelled to mega-actor status. Since then he hasn't really put in a truly brilliant performance. The thing I don't like about Washington is arrogance, he exudes it, I am not sure if its on purpose or not but I think he can certainly add it - just look at his character in Training Day - arrogant to the extreme and this kind of carries on into other films, Inside Man for example. He is also a bit annoying in this film, whenever me says 'My Man' and smiles I just want to slap his face.
However, both of these guys have been in fairly decent films recently, especially Crow in 3.10 to Yuma. So I was of course open to them putting in great performances to make this a great film.
I am not going to go over every point of the film but I Will quickly go over its major flaws Accents - come on Crowe - you are meant to be one of the best. Crowes accent was all over the place in this movie. There is a thread running on IMDb currently running at 6+ pages debating this point but I am 100% sure his accent wasn't consistent throughout.
Gangster - this isn't a gangster film in the truest sense. Its nothing like Goodfellas/Scarface/The Departed/Usual Suspects etc. So you Will Be disappointed they used this title and made it look like something that it definitely is not (marketing eh?) instead expect something slower, much much slower...If you want to see loads of guns and killings and underground activity then this isn't the film for you.
The length and pacing of this film is all wrong. It is too slow and too long. The vast majority of scenes jump from one place to another too quickly. Most of the scenes are too short and there are probably only 2 or 3 really decent scenes. For my money none of these scenes really build up to some sort of peak like they do in the great movies.
So what about Washington and Crowe? Well it is fair to say Crowe was much better in 3.10 to Yuma and in this film he is only really something of a bit part character as he is probably only getting 30% of screen time compared to Washingstons 70%. They were both OK but nothing special.
Good points? Well there are not many. Of course the sets and costumes were definitely decent. The music was good but I was disappointed with the plot.
Having read some of the comments at IMDb the 2 most appropriate words would be 'uninspiring' and 'dull' - its an OK film but it's definitely not as good as they are trying to make it look.
Overall the film is above average. 7/10 - best of the year? Not at all. 3.10 to Yuma is much better overall and deserves any award before American Gangster.