Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe have worked together twice before – 2000’s “Gladiator” and 2006’s “A Good Year.” The former was a critical and commercial hit, while the latter was critically panned and was a box office flop. This year witnesses the third collaboration between the two with this weekend’s “American Gangster.”

The history between these two may be significant, but it would be a sin to forget that this movie STARS Denzel Washington. Russell Crowe is not even the lead in this film, although the two actors share roughly similar amounts of screen time.

“American Gangster” stars Washington in this true story as Frank Lucas, one of the most notorious gangsters in New York City’s history. Lucas worked as a driver and bodyguard for Bumpy Johnson, a successful and ruthless drug lord in his own right, for fifteen years. Following Bumpy’s death, Lucas makes an unprecedented move – he takes over. He brings up his brothers and cousins from North Carolina to work for him, marries a Puerto Rican beauty queen/trophy wife and begins importing unprecedented amounts of heroin from Vietnam while the war is raging. How does he do it? The heroin is shipped into the states in the coffins of soldiers who have died. Once there, Lucas makes a fortune by selling 100% pure heroin for half the street value.

Russell Crowe plays Lucas’ counterpart in the film, detective Richie Roberts. The comparison between these two men is one of the higher points of the film. Lucas is cutthroat, increasingly on edge and violent, but is also devoted to his family and to a certain code of business ethics. Roberts prides himself on being an honest man, the rare breed of cop who has evaded moral corruption in his job. His personal life, however, is a mess. He is going through a divorce due to his womanizing ways, is absent from his son’s life and tends to value his character over the people in his life. Both men are shrouded in an ethical indistinctness throughout placing a dual-character study in a film advertised as blood and guns actioner.

Washington gives a typically thunderous and unnerving performance, which proves impossible to disassociate from his role in “Training Day.” He is rash and unpredictable, prone to frightening acts of violence and blessed with unnatural ability to appear menacing with every smirk. Washington rivets in a role based on subtleties; even the most casual of glances from Lucas results in a ubiquitous sense that this time-bomb of figure will explode at any moment.

Russell Crowe is also in characteristically fine form as the cop who dared to take Lucas down. His Roberts is a flawed individual. In fact, it is almost exclusively his flaws which are brought to screen, but this technique actually serves to further hero-ize Roberts. The final few  scenes of collaboration between Lucas and Roberts prove to be some of the most powerful scenes of the film and cap the character comparisons in a perfect way.

What Scott achieves with “American Gangster,” however, amounts to little more than high quality. Ultimately, what hurts “American Gangster” is inherent to its creation. It delivers a compelling, flawlessly-acted film with perfectly proportioned bits of comedy, action and character study, but cannot add up to any more than the sum of its parts. Scott is not able to do anything to allow “American Gangster” to reach masterpiece status. What the film needed was this story presented in a new way. Its not that the film is bad; in fact, it is very good. It’s just that, when all is said and done, it could have been better.

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