Good reviews and hype can destroy a film by setting expectations too high - and this may have been a problem for American Gangster. This film was hyped quite a bit following it’s release in the States and the word ‘Epic’ was bandied about a lot and I seem to remember Goodfellas being mentioned and maybe even the Godfather. Perhaps because of the American hype, the reviews this side of the pond didn’t seem as glowing which meant my expectations were low enough, and possibly as a result, I loved it.

American Gangster has nothing particularly original going for it, but it does the cop vs gangster thing very well. Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington are extremely watchable, Crowe in particular impressed me as Detective Richie Roberts- I have been going off him a lot recently - but this honest and down to earth performance has renewed my faith in him as an actor who can get over his own ego and give a striking performance.

Washington was perhaps a little too squeaky clean to play the brutal gangster Frank Lucas, but I think this was a deliberate move on the part of the director to mark the contrast between the cop and the gangster, and also to highlight the better side of the Lucas as an intelligent values driven man.

Much like Pitt in the Jesse James film, Washington overcomes any shortcomings on the brutal side by being wonderfully watchable on screen.

American Gangster is set in the seventies and manages to recapture that flat seventies feel which is not to everybodies taste. The finish on the film reminded me of the similarly seventies feel that Zodiac achieved, managing to create dramatic tension without having to resort to carefully orchestrated scores to tell you how you should be feeling at any given moment.

This is very much a character based film, thankfully there are no car chases or major shootouts, but the efforts of both the honest cop and the innovative gangster to make successes of themselves despite the odds make for great watching.

Based on a true story, I would be very interested to know how true to life they kept the stories.

The end of the film is somewhat rushed, understandably perhaps, as there was clearly another film’s worth of material in the final fifteen minutes of an already fairly long film - perhaps someone will make that film another day…