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Dir. Ridley Scott

Rating: 6.1  |  0 User Reviews  |  Send to Friend

By Piers Marchant

It's possible, of course, that repeated viewings of "The Wire" (all together now: "The best TV show ever!") has simply ruined us for any other police procedurals, but Ridley Scott's film about real-life Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas, star-studded and professionally rendered as it is, can't hold a candle to it. Maybe it's an unfair comparison, but the film, written by Steven Zaillian ("Gangs of New York") has Big Things in mind for itself, and, while a commendable effort, it doesn't bring home the bacon. It strives so hard to be larger than life that the paint-by-numbers approach never gets you inside of its material. To begin with, there's the cast: A huge effort has been made to populate this film with the "right" kind of actors, as such, you have your big stars (Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe), your name people (Josh Brolin, Ted Levine, Cuba Gooding Jr.) and your hip hop contingent (T.I., Common, RZA). It's not that any one of them puts in a poor performance, as it happens, they're all very solid, but, to paraphrase Denny Green, they are exactly who you think they are. Washington is charismatic and charming as Lucas, hiding his vicious, dangerous temper; Crowe, as Richie Roberts, the narco who eventually brings Lucas down, is filled with rough-hewn integrity, but neither actor feels like they're deviating much from their standard cinematic character. Meanwhile, the scenes come at us in a sort of epic shorthand, clipped, to-the-point scenes that contain just the information needed to move on to the next scene. In keeping with the blunt force of Scott's vision, the film constantly contrasts the lives of its two main protagonists, Frank, who lives in a deluxe Manhattan apartment surrounded by friends, family and his beautiful, adoring wife (Lymari Nadal); and Richie, whose wife has left him, living in a relative flophouse apartment, mostly very much alone. It's too bad for Scott and his team of Oscar chasers that the material feels so restricted and tied down, drained of potency like a vial of codeine that's been sitting on your medicine shelf for years. As good as he has been in his career, even the most loyal Scott devotee would have to sadly acknowledge in recent years he seems far more a curator than a real filmmaker.

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