Movie News

Black critics slam American Gangster

Wed 14 Nov 11:20 AM

American Gangster, the hit US film starring Denzel Washington as drug dealer Frank Lucas has been criticised by several African-American newspaper columnists for elevating "lowlife" to almost heroic status.

Philadelphia Daily News writer Elmer Smith wrote that it lifted "lowlife to new heights for a generation that doesn't remember or even care who they really were."

Betty Bayé wrote in the Louisville Courier-Journal that she had talked to a former New York school teacher, who told her, "Frank Lucas is the devil ... and some knuckleheads are going to go out and see that movie and think that they want to be just like him."

New York Daily News writer Stanley Crouch compared the film to BET documentary of the same name which focused on Lucas. Crouch said, "Frank Lucas has been given qualities that he simply did not have. We see him played as a soft-spoken and sophisticated man who closely studies the written word and only explodes into violence every now and then. In actuality, as the BET documentary reveals, Lucas was illiterate."

"He not only killed people to impress his ruthlessness on the underworld, but even put out a murder contract on one of his own brothers, whom he had brought from North Carolina to work in the drug trade with him. Lucas squashed the contract only because another brother had been killed and the drug lord did not want his mother to have to mourn for two dead sons at the same time. Always a family man. That such icy qualities are not in the movie makes it a highly crafted piece of poisonous eye candy."

The film has also inspired a number one album of the same name by rapper Jay-Z.