American Gangster
March 2008 Reviewed by: Doug Blackburn Format: HD DVD/DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Yet another Ridley Scott winner with his stamp all over it, American Gangster is based on the true story of a real gangster, Frank Lucas, and the cop who was after him, Richie Roberts. Taking place in the late 1960s and going into the 1970s, the story is anchored in New York City, with ties to Vietnam, Thailand, and North Carolina. It is the story of family, ruthlessness, honor, and character. It is set in a time when cops weren’t necessarily all good and bad guys weren’t necessarily all bad. It’s also the story of corruption and how far it can spread when there’s no will to stop it.

Gangster’s script is excellent, as is Scott’s eye for visual detail and composition. His talent for storytelling without words is put to excellent use in a number of sequences that reveal life in the city, country, and in Southeast Asia. The casting is excellent. Russell Crowe had to lose his Australian accent for his role as the police officer who is after Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas, and does a pretty remarkable job of never letting the Aussie accent slip out. Frank Lucas’s numerous family members are all excellent, especially Ruby Dee’s supporting role as Frank’s mother.

The VC-1 transfer is clean and completely free of artifacts. However, the movie is shot with intentional techniques that make the images look soft. Interior shots are constantly smoke-filled, which reduces detail and contrast. Outdoors, neutral-density filters were used to reduce the amount of light reaching the film, so lens apertures were opened wider to compensate for the loss of light. This intentionally reduces the depth of field, making foreground and background objects less focused than they would have been without the filters. Only in close-ups or within the reduced depth of field do images show all the sharpness and detail high def can deliver. Even some outdoor shots seem to have a contrast-reducing haze in them at times. So this won’t be a high-def reference disc, but it certainly captures exactly the look Scott and his cinematographers captured on film.

The soundtrack is perfect, but there’s nothing that gives your system a workout. This isn’t a big blockbuster or musical, so the soundtrack is less of a showpiece and more of an enabler of the story. Even with Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 being the only English soundtrack offered, you aren’t left with the feeling you are missing anything. The music was well recorded and sounds nicely spacious. Gunshots are crisp and powerful. Dialogue is clean, clear, and matches the sonic space of the scene very well. But it’s unlikely anybody will pick this disc as a sonic demo. The sound engineers succeeded exceptionally well at the task given them by Scott, but the lack of opportunity for the soundtrack to do anything but stay in the background limits the rating -- a difficult decision when the soundtrack is so well-suited to the movie.

Eight deleted scenes, a short feature on the real Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts, and commentary with the director and writer make up the extras. Universal’s U-Control option lets you see picture-in-picture commentary from Ridley Scott and cast members. You can choose to open or close the picture-in-picture window as you watch the movie. Most of the pic-in-pic has to do with what’s going on behind the scenes while the scene in the movie is being shot. The HD DVD and DVD sides of the disc both have the theatrical release. The DVD side also has an optional extended version with 18 minutes of additional footage. I found the extras moderately interesting, but there was nothing special enough to merit a higher rating.

This disc has web-enabled content that requires an Internet connection but fails to add anything truly worthwhile.You get a bunch of questions you can answer, then see what percentage of other respondents picked each of the answers (whoopee!); a two-and-a-half-minute deleted scene (fullscreen, and very low resolution) that took more than five minutes to download with a blazing-fast DSL connection; and three trailers -- one TV spot, a Universal promo, and an HD DVD promo (yet more whoopee!). The login process requires setting up a username, password, and other information using just the direction arrows and select button on the remote. That’s very tedious when the payoff for the investment in time is so weak. But I guess you can use the account the next time you have a Universal disc with web-enabled features.

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