My man! The American Gangster is Denzel Washington, a black man, who has become larger than the mob and mafia. Russell Crowe plays the 100% honest cop in times of corruption that tracks him down. This is an "R" rated movie, and should be regarded as one full of profanity, nudity, and violence.

This movie can be compared to last year’s The Departed. The Scorcese firm is better (I’d give it a 3.5 out of 5) but Ridely Scott’s mob movie here is no doubt, well done. The Departed kept you going the whole time, the movie was always moving forward. American Gangster takes 30 minutes to find itself. It attempts to give a back-story of each character but in doing so loses the audience for quite a while.

Crowe is much different in this movie than 3:10 to Yuma, which shows why Crowe is an A-list actor. He can throw himself into any role and become an entirely new person. This character is not deeply written but Crowe does what he can with it. Washington, on the other hand, can be a bit hit or miss. He’s fine in this movie, but I see nothing Oscar-worthy about the performance. Training Day is one of the few movies I don’t see Denzel in, but instead a whole other person.

This is a true story of one guy who came from nothing and made himself into one of the largest drug dealers of his time. It also unfortunately shows how corrupt our society was at that time with corrupt police and corrupt armed forces doing all parts of the drug trafficking. From that standpoint, it is very interesting; it could even be compared with movies like Nicholas Cage’s Lord of War.

As with all mob movies, the head guy usually makes some mistakes along the way…power corrupts and makes you do some dumb things. Chinchilla coats are a dead give away, don’t they know that? Anyway, this being a true story, I’ll let you figure out how it ends, but one thing I know you’ll take from the movie is a whole new catch phrase. And when you agree with me, I’ll be hearing…American Gangster..my man!