A review far shorter than the subject

On a surprise two-for-one movie deal (more on that later), The Girl and I spent a Saturday afternoon with American Gangster Ridley Scott's new bio-pic of Frank Lucas, a drug dealer from New York, circa 1970 or so.

It's not exactly the 100% truth of Frank's story, but the film tells the dual stories of Lucas and the Richie Roberts, the police officer who finally took Frank down. Instead of the absolute truth, we get the battle of the two men - one of whom has no idea that he's locked in a battle for his life.

The tale sets Frank up as a family man who keeps his nose to the grindstone and his profile as low as a multi-millionaire drug dealer in the 60's and 70's could be. Roberts is the epitome of an honest cop (turning in a found million dollars early in the film) whose home life is a disaster. Roberts puts together his own crew of honest cops who spend their every waking moment putting together a case against whoever is bringing in and distributing higher quality heroin cheaper than anybody else in town can manage. And in a shocking turn of events, it turns out to be a black man - not the mafia lifer that all of the other cops are expecting.

The film's dramatic tension is well-crafted, setting the black and white, good versus bad battle on its head as Frank is portrayed as a solid family man, keeping his nose clean in spite of dealing death on the streets. Frank works only with his family, takes care of his mother, and doesn't spend lavishly and foolishly, whereas Roberts can't save a buck, can't find time to take care of his son, can't separate his friends from the criminals.

The film takes too long, however, to allow the tale to come to a head, letting the case build and build until Frank is finally in too deep, unravelled by the one action that he takes the showing of any hubris, the wearing of a fur coat.

In the end, the final confrontation is satisfying, but the film continues along past that point to, instead, an unsatisfying conclusion.

Good...far from great...

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Thanks to Katydid, I got to check out another film that's been on the list for a while now: Children of Men starring the ever-rising star Clive Owen - and for about thirty seconds, Julianne Moore.

The film's a true dystopia as we find ourselves in the somewhat near future, probably twenty years from now, as all the women in the world have beomce mysteriously infertile and no child has been born in the last eighteen years. The film opens with the youngest person on the planet passing away and Owens narrowly avoiding being blown to bits in the local bit of world-wide chaos and violence.

Owens finds himself quickly thrust into an underground movement lead by his ex-wife (Moore) whose group of rebels is trying to sneak the world's only pregnant woman out of Britain in spite of massive military resistance.

The film doesn't contain a lot of happy moments as the journey to the seaside rendesvous is pretty harrowing and violent, with nearly every character we meet along the way dying or being peeled off from Owen's shrinking band of helpers. People are shot, burned, knocked off of motorcycles, and bashed with concrete - all in the name of protecting the first child born into the world in nearly two decades.

In spite of the violence and tension, the film is a bit slow until the characters reach the refugee camp of Beckshill, home to hundreds if not thousands of non-British residents who have been rounded up and will soon be killed or deported. It is in that refugee camp that the film's final act becoems a story of redemption. In what I found easily the most moving scene of the well-reviewed tale, Owens and the mother are found out amidst a full scale military-refugee fire fight.

That one scene - the details of which I'll forgo to avoid spoilers - lifts the movie above the level of futuristic disaster pic set up by a horrible but mysterious accident in that future dystopia's past. For much of the film, Owens' reluctant hero saves his own skin while showing as little nobility as possible, an everyman thrust into a fight that he didn't seek, doing the best job that he can in spite of the world's insistance that he fail. The climactic scene, however, shows the reaction of soldiers and freedom fighters to the miraculous event and shifts Owens into the father figure in what could be an entirely restorative world event, and he performs admirably.

Following that cilmax, the film effectively faded to black, leaving me wanting more in the way of a resolution - something that was apparently common to today's two reviewed films.

Again, I'm gonna go with the high-mid rating of good but not great - with the caveat that there is one truly transcendent moment late in the film.