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Heroin goes to Harlem

Denzel Washington squares off with Russel Crowe in the drug-trade drama, 'American Ganster'

NOT TOO FAR into "American Gangster," you realize the filmmakers mean those two words to be synonymous.

The movie, set in the late 1960s/early '70s, opens with a pair of Harlem hoods exploring a new electronics superstore and lamenting the demise of the mom-and-pop.

For old-timer Bumpy Johnson (Clarence Williams III), it's a startling omen, marking the end of the era of personal service, and he drops dead on the spot.

His lieutenant Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), however, sees the future. He looks at a chain store importing goods from the Far East, and takes the lesson to heart — within a decade, he's bringing pure heroin from Thailand to the States, selling high-grade drugs at a cheaper price, and becoming the chairman and CEO of the largest criminal enterprise in New York, if not America.

This saga of entrepreneurship, globalization and ruthlessness and its implied critique of capitalism is more than a little glib — Lucas controls all the stock, pays no dividends, and his employee health plan is that if you screw up you get shot.

And there's something hypocritical about a $100 million Hollywood movie taking shots at fatcats who push noxious products on the public, particularly from the producer who brought us "The Cat in the Hat."

"American Gangster" is overstuffed with half-baked subversions, but all of that is almost beside the point. The two most important words in any description of the movie are: Denzel Washington.

The movie is a big, sprawling, ambitious (and fact-based) gangster saga about a guy as contradictory as Michael Corleone, as trigger-happy as Tony Montana. Washington is at the top of a very short list of actors capable of sustaining it.

This is one of his richest characters — brilliant, ruthless, fiercely determined to succeed but reluctant to display success. It's Lucas' discretion that protects him — he eludes white authorities who simply cannot believe that a black man could out-mob the mob.

"American Gangster" isn't simply a biopic built around the arc of a man's life. It gives Lucas a foil in Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), the cop-turned-fed assigned to target Lucas' operation. Roberts is a strange mirror image of Lucas — as dedicated to the law as Lucas is to crime, a failure with his family where Lucas values blood ties above almost all else.

Roberts' probity and independence (from corrupt colleagues) allows him to see what the mob and authorities initially cannot — that it's the unassuming Lucas, not the flashier Nicky Barnes (Cuba Gooding Jr.), who's really the head of the Harlem drug snake.

"American Gangster" has been compared to "The Godfather" or "Scarface" or "Public Enemy," but it doesn't follow the classic lines of the gangster bio. It takes that material and hinges it to "The French Connection" (actually mentioned here), so the story swings between Lucas' empire and Roberts' endeavor to trace Lucas' distribution network through Vietnam and into Thailand. Lucas uses American military transports and in some cases the caskets of dead servicemen (apparently, shockingly, true).

Director Ridley Scott ("Gladiator") gives the movie the blue-ish, gritty tone of the great cops and robbers movies of the 1970s, but he also peoples his movie with performers capable of carrying that kind of weight.

Everything rides on the actors who embody the two sides of this spinning character coin and I can think of no two contemporary actors I'd rather watch than Washington and Crowe ("Virtuosity" notwithstanding).

When they finally meet in the movie's final scenes, it's great stuff, not just a showy confrontation of big-time stars, but a scene of unusual dimension and gravity.

It's a rare instance of a movie gangster, though wrapped in the unavoidable cloak of big-screen glamour, being held to account for the retail-level destruction caused by his criminal operation.

It's fun to see Roberts bat aside Lucas' self-serving constructions and moral evasions, leaving Lucas unable to explain, in the end, why a jury of his Harlem peers will convict him based mostly on the testimony of one old woman who lost her son to drug addiction. *

Produced by Brian Grazer and Ridley Scott, directed by Ridley Scott, written by Steve Zaillian, music by Marc Streitenfeld, distributed by Universal Pictures.