Very good but...

Rating: 8/10 (2 November 2007)

I don't think that's good enough. There were a lot of extremely talented people on this project so the fact that it's just a very good movie is kinda disappointing to me. A lot of it was typical. Typical story told in a typical style with typical acting. And mostly I mean Denzel Washington. Very early in this film I though 'you know Samuel L. Jackson would have been better in this'. In my opinion, he's not only a better actor, but he also doesn't play himself all the time. I know this isn't a popular opinion but I think Denzel plays himself most of the time. Role to role it's Denzel, looking like Denzel, playing Denzel in a very Denzelly way. So I kinda wish another actor had had the lead here (even if it was Chewitel Ejiofor who seems to be making a career as the guy who walks slightly behind and to the left of Denzel) and at some point I just wanted them to get back to the scenes with Russell Crowe.
As luck would have it, I saw a History Channel program last night called "Gangland" that focused on Frank Lucas. So I basically had a primer for this movie and it seems fairly accurate from what I could tell. So any comparisons to other films would have to do with style because it's not a ripoff of anything. Other movies it might remind you of are Blow, Scarface, Heat, Serpico, Donnie Brasco, etc. It almost makes you wonder how Al Pacino wasn't in it, but those movies were better in my opinion probably because of the way the stories were told. This was a basic story about a drug dealer who eventually gets caught. He's mean, he goes to Vietnam, he's still mean, he works with dirty cops, he's mean... You never really get any motivations or psychological reasons why he became who he did. He just did. I think that made the Roberts characters more interesting. Maybe he was just a more interesting person in real life I don't know, but even the background stuff with his family just seemed tacked on. I guess I expected more from these people. I think some of the supporting cast was great but then they had a few rappers in there. And I'm sorry but that bugs me. Please no more rappers. I go to a movie to see actors pretend to be hoods not real life hoods.
I don't know. I guess a lot of little things got to me in this film. But it not really bad. It's just that it's nothing new. Nothing profound. Nothing mind-blowing. Nothing amazing to look at. If someone asked me what movie they should see and they were thinking about this one but weren't sure, I'd send them to Gone Baby Gone. At one point I started to wonder what someone from New York like Brian De Palma or Spike Lee would have done with the same story and I imagined it being a lot better. But again, it's not bad. It just should have been better. If you're a fan of these guys by all means see it. I don't want to deter anyone who is really interested. It may be your favorite movie of the year. It just didn't live up to my expectations.