Coasts in neutral for too long. What went wrong, Sir Ridley?

Rating: 7/10 (21 March 2008)

The first thing everyone mentions--or likes--about American Gangster is that it's based on a remarkable true story. Well, three such classics were released 30yrs ago, around the time AG is set: The French Connection(1971), Serpico(1973), and The SuperCops(1974). There weren't more basically because the Knapp Commission nabbed the corrupt cops, making the story moot, until Blow(2001).
While AG(2007) references Dets.Eddie Egan and Sonny Grasso of the actual Marseilles ("French Connection") drug bust, SuperCops(1974) spoofed two real undercover cops of the time. Nicknamed "Batman and Robin" by most of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Dave Greenberg and Bob Hantz worked their beat miles from Frank Lucas' Harlem.
So a lot of early 1970s cops got famous for doing their jobs, since the heroin-based "black(secret) economy" grew to employ so many people over the previous 20yrs that it corrupted police forces across the country.
Sadly as a biopic, AG coasts in neutral until Sam and Dave's Hold_On_I'm_Comin' at 38mins.
The Australian version comes out the gate like the Sopranos, unfortunately following its violent opening with a disjoint 1968 scene of Lucas(Washington) intently watching Bumpy(Clarence Williams.III)'s "bread-and-circuses" act from the back. It's also unclear that Frank is already dealing for himself when he's harassed by "Mr 20%"(Idris Elba). These are editing issues.
Not only are signpost dates of the story often missing (or are so subtle that you only catch them by accident), but the structural choice to stay ahead of the audience for 4/5ths of this LONG movie robs our eventual discovery (about how the drugs were being smuggled) of emotional impact. Better-structured movies like Michael Clayton(2007) "promise" an explanation, and deliver at least two-thirds in.
AG also lacks humour, with only two such scenes: the one where Richie(Crowe) is offered a bribe of a new technology called a microwave and he replies "No thank you", and where he hauls a man following him off the street to discover the guy is just a process-server loosening his bowels into his pants.
The need to appeal to younger audiences forced some awkward overcompensations with the language, substituting Ebonics (1990s) for Jive (1970s). This is a subconscious irritant for anyone who's watched the original "Mod Squad"(1968-1973), which, incidentally, gave Clarence Williams.III his career.
Worst of all, AG suffers horribly from megastar miscastings. Joe Morton (too sweet for a gangster), Cuba Gooding.Jr (overacting in a nothing role), and Russell Crowe (too much the Bronzed Aussie with a 1980s haircut!!) all should've been recast with unknowns. Denzel even looks wrong: the real Frank Lucas looked more like the pudgy Frank Hayes character from SuperCops(1974).
It's great that (as Lucas) Washington quotes Chris Rock's standup about African-Americans not knowing how to become "wealthy", but his acting choices for Frank don't always suit him. Denzel crucially lacks credibility speaking even Ebonics--witness his "bid'ness" and "bup-bup-bup-bup-baaaaa" while arguing with Nate(Roger Guenveur Smith).
Smith's "a'ight" is groaningly bad, too--it doesn't fit his uniform; while Ted Levine("Buffalo Bill" from Silence of the Lambs(1991)) and Armand Assante are just two mushmouths too many on AG. Crowe never gets the Australian out of his "Jewish" NY accent; and (as Joey Sadano) Ritchie Coaster can't get the Italian in. What is this? Duelling (Bad)Accents?! Whether these stars were miscast, rushed for time, or just poorly edited, SOMEBODY sold us "an Edsil".
"Sir"Ridley Scott is responsible for this disappointment, with help from his brother Tony and Brian Grazer. What went wrong? Presumably there just wasn't enough screen time for exposition or "light-and-shade" in this long movie pared-to-the-bone-from-being-really-overlong, so that even Oscar-winning editor Pietro Scalia looks like he screwed up. Scalia's second "guerilla montage" of drug-addicted devastation is so easy to miss (lasting only 27s) that it's virtually subliminal--so why make a biopic on the topic? One can just sense a much longer Director's Cut in the offing. Hopefully. Studio execs should just LET Ridley WORK.
Eventually the audience compensates for the uneven editing and figures out what the plot's doing and who everybody is, but it's no longer enjoyable.
Beyond that, there's the social discomfort of the family's corruption. Frank was "buying off cops since (he) was 10yrs old" and his mother was ignoring it for 30yrs. Much of our discomfort is editorialised through the irony of recalling more innocent imagery of North-migrating African-American families in slow-creeping Lincolns.
I had surprisingly strong revulsions against 1) Mama Lucas(Ruby Dee)'s unquestioning ACCEPTANCE of her career-criminal son's massive mansion; and 2) against Frank's "Miss Puerto Rico" wife, who thought that dumping a kind boxing champion for a murdering drug baron was the apex of social-climbing. But "you don't know what you'd do till you're put under pressure; a'course 110th Street is a hellova tester"(Bobby Womack, 1972).
To his credit, Ridley doesn't shy away from indirectly critiquing 1970s Harlem, either. He encourages our dismay at Bumpy Johnson's "Robbin' Hood" act back in 1968 by showing how Bumpy, and later Frank, controlled Harlem with "bread and circuses" like Emperor Commodus.
Not for nothing', but 1968 was the last year of Martin Luther King's life; his words fell on deaf ears in Harlem, where people were more interested in Frank's frozen turkeys....we now know better, realising that this supplanting drug-economy made Harlem virtually a "failed state", not much better than Afghanistan today.
For anyone still unsure, there is a more sinister explanation for AG's disappointment, involving its 68 "stunt people", of whom only 28 at most appear on screen (during the Huey Lucas chase). Most of those do little work for the money. The stunts budget, then, probably pushed the whole so far into the red that there wasn't any left for cleanup of the booms in shot, at least 4x in the Sydney print! There are, of course, many things that work, but the studio's insistence on cutting AG for time made it into a "frozen turkey", when by rights Ridley Scott should have delivered us a Thanksgiving dinner.
Maybe the (40-or-so) missing stunt people ATE it.(7/10)