Ridley Scott makes fine films and is nothing short of a professional but he seems incapable of making a film that distinguishes itself as the work of a singular artist. For this reason I don’t think Ridley Scott will ever graduate from Filmmaker to the exalted rank of Auteur. He shows us lots of people, places, and things in American Gangster, and all are conceived without error, but this very same craftsmanship tells a story without a vision, without an aesthetic that could only have come from one person and one person alone. He doesn’t really have a signature style or possess the idiosyncrasies necessary to imprint an unusual obsession onto the screen. He does his job very well – and that’s just the thing: bringing this story to life appears to be just a job for him rather than a creative endeavor. Too often Scott’s eye feels like that of a tourist. I want to be submerged into the milieu, not have it showcased to me by a foreigner. Scott shows us junkies lying in decrepit torpor on their dirty mattresses, but it is viewed as if it were a presentation in a slideshow about inner city squalor made by someone who’s just passing through. There’s no weight or impact from many of the images because they are presented in an impersonal manner, mechanically. Again, it is done well, but why must it be done by someone who is not passionate about the material? And why must the material feel so dully familiar?
I consider Blade Runner and Alien to be masterpieces, but those were Scott’s 3rd and 2nd films, early works, visions, in a long career of unremarkable celluloid manufacturing. To say a film is unremarkable is not to say it is bad or even mediocre, but that it contains nothing really weird, or intimate, or uncommon, or extraordinary. Gladiator was stirring when I was 14 and the Hans Zimmer score at the end still moves me, but the rest of it is so drearily conventional, so timid in avoiding the Grand Guignol Savagery a film titled Gladiator deserves. Gladiator’s violence is little more brutal or disturbing than the PG-13 creature killings in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Then again, perhaps it was wise for Scott to play it safe; it's doubtful that David Cronenberg’s Gladiator would have won the Academy Award for Best Picture. But it would have been a hell of a lot more interesting.
American Gangster is as unadventurous as Gladiator. It trudges through the motions that other movies have already exercised, about a small-time hood rising in rank, wealth, and desperation and the dogged cop whose dedication to his work has cost him his wife and child. You get two derivations for the price of one; in fact the entire film is a hand-me-down. A refined and intermittently compelling duplicate of rawer, more dangerous movies, American Gangster seems more concerned with being sufficient than exceptional.
It is paced unevenly as well, only finding peaks and valleys in momentum rather than achieving the uphill propulsion of Goodfellas, a film it wants to evoke (as well as others), especially with its very opening scene, a moment of abrupt and jaw-dropping violence. That opening scene certainly grabbed my attention, and was promising, but the rest of the film, though good and well-acted, just isn’t that potent. Ridley Scott needs to stop making films until he finds one that isn’t just another job, but a communication of his personal demons, an exploration of his mind. Other than that, he’s just making a movie.
Grade: C+
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