Turning Back the Clock, But What For?

Here’s a modest proposal: Let’s get over the 1970s. Can we, please? Perhaps we could start a revival of the ’90s, those halcyon days of the Internet bubble and Monica.

Or maybe turn the clock back to the 1870s and the intriguing era of Reconstruction.

Speaking of the 1870s, the last time we saw Russell Crowe was circa 1870, wearing the black hat and sporting a reasonable drawl in "3:10 to Yuma." In "American Gangster," Crowe wears the figurative white hat and struggles unsuccessfully to do a New Jersey accent — one of many distractions in Scott’s sprawling orgy of the 1970s, based on the true story of "Superfly" Frank Lucas, kingpin of Harlem drug lords.

Crowe plays Richie Roberts, the supposedly lily-pure detective who brings Lucas to justice. His adversary is depicted by the always-watchable Denzel Washington, who brings as much subtlety to his part as possible, considering it was written with a sledgehammer.

The movie’s central conceit plays on the incongruity between Lucas’s (and Washington’s) outward charm and "normalcy" and his true nature as a psychopathic, amoral killer. In case we might not get the point, Scott opens the movie with a scene of Lucas setting a man on fire and shooting him in cold blood. Thanks, Ridley, we needed that.

Lucas is a clever entrepreneur and loyal family man with an anger management problem. Sound familiar? It’s because "The Sopranos" already perfected that schtick.

Despite the opening scene and a few other random flashbacks of violence, the first half of this nearly three-hour movie is annoyingly static — all exposition and no development. Scott shovels heaping spoonfuls of period ambience on us: disco balls; celebrities from Mohammed Ali to Sammy Davis Jr., variously played by actors and seen in real life in television footage; news clips of the Vietnam War and Tricky Dick, too. OK, we get it. It’s the ’70s.

The second half of the movie picks up the pace as the tension builds, with Roberts slowly, very slowly, closing in on his prey. Armand Assante adds some needed juice as a Mafia boss and rival of Lucas. The rest of the enormous and talented supporting cast, headed by Cuba Gooding Jr., is largely wasted. Unfortunately, Crowe and Washington don’t actually meet until the last ten minutes of the film. Their scene together is well played, but anticlimactic.

The whole enterprise feels drained of voltage, especially considering that the real Lucas was allegedly larger than life.

This is a problem with the genre of biopics, I think, even ones that could, or should, take dramatic shape. Too often they fail to jump off the storyboard of "scenes from a life" and become something more.

Tellingly, many of the scenes and even some of the dialogue in "Gangster" rely heavily on a New York magazine profile of Lucas from 2000, titled "The Return of Superfly." Scott crams into the movie many of the incidents described by Lucas in the article and retrofits the quotations as needed. There they serve as markers of authenticity (here’s Lucas with Joe Louis; now here he is staking out his dealers; now here he is shooting his enemy; now he’s explaining his business philosophy, etc.). But they don’t help propel the story forward.

The movie’s best moments are reserved for Washington, when he conveys a perverse sense of wounded pride in achieving, as a master criminal, a status that no African- American man had ever attained.

I’m just not sure that’s the kind of legacy we want to be celebrating.

"American Gangster" is rated R for violence, pervasive drug content and language, nudity and sexuality.

It is playing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, and the Cineroms in Torrington and Winsted, CT.