Film

The new millennium has been rough on Scott: His epic-scale films—Black Hawk Down, Kingdom of Heaven—have been an honorable failure and a ridiculous mess, respectively, and his “smaller” pictures—Matchstick Men, A Good Year—have looked like leading-man showcases in which the leading men were annoying. With the true story of Harlem druglord Frank Lucas, Scott tries to balance the grandeur of his vision with a strong anchoring lead. Scott’s mastery of working big and Washington’s unstoppable screen charisma might make you want to overlook this huge, bold film’s flaws.

Lucas (Washington) rises to the top of the heroin trade in America using a combination of ruthlessness and a CEO’s eye for controlling costs. In the late 1960s, he has two grand ideas: If you eliminate the middleman, you can maximize your profit; and the presence of American troops in Southeast Asia provides a direct pipeline to the source of his drug supply. While Lucas builds a business empire, honest-to-a-scruple cop Richie Roberts (Crowe) goes on the hunt against drug dealers and corrupt cops. Eventually, Lucas comes to Roberts’s attention, and the game is on.

Crowe and especially Washington have the magnetism to hold our attention for two and a half hours, even when the script by Steven Zaillian (Gangs of New York, All the King’s Men) gets stuck on making a few big points over and over: Crime is just another version of capitalism; each man’s moral code contains contradictions. The flatness of the supporting roles is a suggestive failing; a better writer would have given us more than two interesting characters. Scott is good enough that he can even make Zaillian’s back-and-forth structure (Lucas, tick, Roberts, tock) feel profound rather than clunky, but all Scott’s skill and Washington’s flair can’t make up for the limitations of the script.