#American gangster games movie
Scott has shuffled the classic scenes and tropes of the gangster movie and dealt them like a deck of playing cards. There’s so much sweaty, pugnacious masculinity in the air, the testosterone is condensing and running down the windows in rivulets.
![american gangster games american gangster games](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6EovOGaP-2s/hqdefault.jpg)
Wide collars and centre-partings are much in evidence President Nixon is always making jowly appearances on TV sets and Steve Zaillian’s script has Roberts, while giving chase to a cash-laden car, shouting to his own driver: “Follow the money!” in sly tribute to the Watergate catchphrase. Criminals tend also to be liars, of course, and it is possible that this particular juicy detail may be exaggerated or just invented, but director Ridley Scott has taken the inner-city urban myth at face value in this muscular period drama starring Denzel Washington as New York’s emperor of smack, and Russell Crowe as the rumpled officer coming after him. Lucas’s career is heavily pregnant with one irresistible metaphor he claimed to have directly imported high-grade heroin into the United States from the far east during the Vietnam war, hiding the drugs in the flag-bedecked coffins of fallen American troops - containers that, naturally, no one dared touch. The film is about the 1970s Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts, the straight-arrow cop who took him down. It’s got no more dark grandeur than American Idol. And that attempt at instant classic status in the title doesn’t quite convince. H ere’s a startlingly original true-life story told in an oddly unoriginal way.