Ridley Scott Gives True Crime a Shot in American Gangster
American Gangster. Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
In 2007 Ridley Scott took a break from historical epics and war movies to make American Gangster, a true crime biopic about drug dealer Frank Lucas. And I’ll tell you what - this movie is fine. It’s just fine. Nothing spectacular, but it’s a competently made crime saga that tells about the rise and fall of an American gangster. Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe are fun actors to watch, teaming up again for a re-do of Virtuosity.
Ridley Scott more or less rescued the film from development hell. The studio had initially placed the production in the hands of notoriously terrible director Antoine Fuqua who, in totally predictable fashion, Fuqua’d it up so badly that they had to pay Denzel Washington $20 million to do nothing (he had a pay or play contract). Having sunk so much money into a project and with nothing to show for it, the studio felt a moral obligation to get the thing made and so Scott was ultimately enlisted to drag it across the finish line.
As I say, it’s a fine film, a bit long and there’s no way it should have cost $100 million to make. But it wasn’t a passion project like so much of Scott’s other work, and I think it shows. He’s almost like a journeyman director being brought in to clean up someone else’s mess in American Gangster, and it was the first real biopic he ever shot. Biographical films are not and have never been Ridley Scott’s specialty, and he’s also not a prolific maker of crime films. He dipped into that genre with Thelma & Louise but that was a lot less conventional than American Gangster, and therefore more interesting I would say.
After American Gangster, Scott began to branch out more into both true and fictional crime stories with The Counselor and All The Money in the World and those are some of the worst movies he has ever made. So the moral here is that while he is capable of rescuing a true crime saga with big name talented actors from the toilet bowl of development hell, perhaps he should have stopped in 2007. Subsequent forays into the crime genre for Ridley Scott have seen diminishing returns and these films just don’t spark with the same kind of energy as the stuff he is really motivated and passionate about, like aliens yanking peoples’ spines out of their necks.
