"American Gangster"

But Roberts isn't so scrupulous about his personal life: His ex, Laurie (Carla Gugino, a terrific actress who's wasted in the few small scenes she gets), is trying to bar him from seeing his young son. And the movie reminds us, repeatedly, that he likes to sleep with women: a lawyer here, a stewardess there. (They were still called "stewardesses" in those days.) Somehow, this "failing" is supposed to make him morally complex, although the simpler explanation is that he's probably just really horny.

"American Gangster" doesn't need to set up those false semi-parallels between Roberts and Lucas. That Scott feels the need to do so suggests that, subconsciously at least, he doesn't trust the actors to give these characters interesting contours on their own. Many of the scenes here feel truncated, unshaped, rushed: Just as I'd feel I was finally getting a chance to hunker down and focus on what Washington or Crowe was doing, Scott would sweep the action elsewhere. (The supporting actors have it worse: Ejiofor, who has a total of about five lines, is barely an accessory. Dee does manage to wrest control in one small scene -- but then again, she's Ruby Dee.)

Scott apparently wants to use "American Gangster" to tell a dozen different stories: The picture is a little "Superfly," a little "Scarface," a little "Serpico," and yet not enough of any them. That's frustrating, because Scott does at least have a grasp of old-fashioned movie-star glamour (you don't cast actors like Crowe and Washington if you don't), and the picture's morality is the old-fashioned Hollywood kind, which, done right, can be deeply satisfying.

"American Gangster" does glamorize the gangster as icon -- again, you don't cast Denzel Washington unless you're willing to accept that charisma is often the secret weapon of the successful crook. But Scott also includes -- to an almost laughable degree -- plenty of unpalatable shots of needles penetrating not just virgin skin but assorted boils and bruised veins, and there's also the obligatory shot of a bewildered-looking toddler wailing plaintively next to his OD'd mother. Scott wants to be conscientious, but he also wants to titillate and excite us. Those goals can bump against each other uncomfortably, and at the very least, Scott seems aware of that. While there's violence in "American Gangster," it's fairly muted. We may hear gunfire, we may see splats of blood, but Scott is more interested in artful cutting than in seducing us with excess. It's a choice that suggests some thought; he's not courting the moviegoing audience's more bloodthirsty impulses. And cinematographer Harris Savides gives the picture a suitably brooding aura, without making it look too murky or dead.

But even if Scott has given some thought to how he feels about these characters, his ideas don't always translate clearly. Scott doesn't set Lucas up as a hero, but he also seems a little snowed by him: He's fascinated, perhaps too fascinated, by the way Lucas applies the rules of civilized commerce, and a grand degree of personal decorum, to the business of drug dealing. (After his arrest and conviction, the real-life Lucas was sentenced to 70 years in prison, though he served only 15 for cooperating with authorities by nailing his crooked-cop associates. He and Roberts, both of whom acted as consultants on the movie, are friends.) Washington's performance allows at least some complexity to come through: We see him flashing that zillion-watt smile when he faces his public -- his mother, his family, the neighborhood people he wants to impress. We also see his blankness in the face of what his product -- this product he's so proud of -- does to people, especially, among his clientele, black people. Washington's chief value as an actor lies in his coldness, not in his charm. Here, Scott generally seems too taken with the charm and not strongly enough attuned to the coldness: It's possible that Washington's performance -- as he gave it while the cameras were rolling -- contains more of a chill than we see in the finished product. There's no way to know for sure.

Crowe makes even less of an impression, perhaps partly because the conscience-stricken cop, dressed mostly in schleppy undercover clothes, is admittedly a less flashy one. Crowe is an actor who doesn't need flash. What he does need, though, is a bit of breathing room, space to stretch out in a scene and let us see how his mind is working. "American Gangster" doesn't afford him that. That's strange, because whatever Scott's flaws may be as a director, he at least understands -- from the exhilarating "Gladiator," and even from the clumsy but likable "A Good Year" -- the depth that Crowe is capable of. For Crowe, this is a restrictive role in a restrictive movie: He plays his character with perfect dutifulness, yet he barely registers as a presence. At one point, a mob bigwig named Dominic Cattano played -- or maybe "overplayed" is the better word -- by Armand Assante invites Lucas to his pretend English manse, somewhere, we assume, in New Jersey. "The whole place is imported, brick by brick," he tells Lucas proudly, showing off the estate's unreal authenticity with the sweep of an arm. "American Gangster" is a movie that feels imported, brick by brick, partly from real life and partly from the imagination of its creators. Unlike that mansion, it doesn't stack up.

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