American Gangster

Over this weekend, I went to see the most talked about movie all year, American Gangster. I should admit that before the movie even started I was ready to go home. Not only were we in the second row and my eyes were killing me, but when I found out the movie was over 2 hours long I almost died. The most interesting part of the movie is the fact that its based on a true story and the guy it’s about Frank Lucas, is still alive. Ill talk about the plot briefly; Frank Lucas, followed his mentor into continuing the biggest drug empire in the 1970’s.

Frank found a way to get good heroin cheap so he sold it cheap and made a lot of profit off of it. He was not only violent, but he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in the 70’s. He made over $1,000,000 a day selling heroin to soldiers and to people all over New York. Throughout his life he killed over 100 people and in a particular scene shoots a rival in the head in during the daytime in front of hundreds of people and didn’t get arrested for it. He wasn’t so bad though, every 2 weeks he bought $500,000 worth of food for all the people in the neighborhood and bought his mother her dream house. The movie depicts how corrupt the cops were during those days and the reason he stayed out of jail for so long was because he paid off 80% of the cops at the time. The one cop Richie Roberts played by Russell Crowe was one of the very few who was not corrupt and worked day and night trying to catch Denzel Washington. Obviously he ended up getting caught, but he ratted out all the corrupt cops and went to jail for only 8 years. To this day he is still very wealthy and living a luxurious life. Its crazy to think a criminal like him, could live such a good life even though he got caught and normally would have served consecutive life sentences if he hadn’t ratted out all those cops.