Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) might be a gangster in the eyes of some, but I came away from Ridley Scott’s American Gangster feeling he should be teaching business courses somewhere. I’d just finished watching Part 2 of the final season of The Sopranos, and Tony Soprano and Frank Lucas have something in common: When things are going well, they’re good family men and good businessmen. But when someone goes against the grain, they "get rid of him." In fact, at the beginning of American Gangster, Lucas torches a victim, then shoots him -- presumably to spare him the agony of a slower death, or perhaps just to be sure.

The film is based on the life of the actual Frank Lucas, who inherited a crime empire from his boss, Bumpy Johnson, then cornered the drug market in New York City, using capitalist strategies. He eliminated the middle man, then flew to Asia to get the heroin directly. He could then offer a purer product at a lower price than those selling an inferior grade cut with additives. At the end of his career, Lucas was arrested and, again being a good businessman, reduced his sentence by trading evidence that put away roughly three-fourths of the New York City narcotics squad for corruption.

Lucas is chased, throughout the film, by Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), perhaps the only honest narc on the planet. Roberts recovered $1 million in drug money and turned it all in without keeping a nickel for himself -- an act that has alienated him from most of his fellow cops, all of whom are on the take. But it is appreciated by his boss, who asks Roberts to form a squad of honest cops to capture the kingpin of the New York drug industry. At first, Lucas isn’t suspected -- it’s hard for the narcs to believe that an African-American could devise and execute such a successful plan. But bit by bit, as Roberts digs deeper, it becomes evident that Lucas is their man.

It’s an engrossing story, but not told as well as it could have been. Though Washington and Crowe do everything they can, the script betrays them, and at 2 hours 37 minutes, American Gangster is too long, much of it just window dressing or padding. What’s left proceeds at a snail’s pace: The scenes of Roberts fighting his wife for custody of their child are superfluous, and stop the action dead in its tracks each time one appears. But even had those scenes been cut, there’s still little character development. Each of the two principals is an icon, a pasteboard cutout representing a class; neither comes across as an individual. The trump card of race, of different ethnic minorities striving for success (Roberts is Jewish), is not played till late in the movie. More back information on the effect this might have had on the main characters would have given us more understanding of them. And Lucas and Roberts don’t meet until the very end, when they sit on opposite sides of a table in an interrogation room. The scene crackles with subdued energy, but it’s too little too late.

At the end of We Own the Night, I felt for and with the main characters; at the end of American Gangster, I felt nothing for Lucas or Roberts, who seem like chessmen crawling slowly toward checkmate. Endgame, eventually . . . but so what?

All that said, American Gangster will probably figure in the Oscar nominations. It seems "important," if only for its cast and director. It’s no disaster, but neither is it a phenomenal success. Too many films today are too long for no good reason, all that time being used to add importance rather than important content. Add this one to the list of films that need "director’s cuts" that are shorter, not longer, than the original.

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