American Gangster

First, let me apologize to my wife. I watch the movies I blog about the Monday morning before, that way I have 2 days to think about it and what I'm going to write about. Well, this movie is 3 hours long (the extended edition) and she hates every minute of it. This made for a very long morning for poor, poor Amanda. Ize can has sorries?

For those who have never seen American Gangster, shame. It's a really well made film and it has a really good story line, but, not wanting to get a good rep, Director Ridley Scott couldn't help but put an F-Bomb in every 20 seconds of the movie. Seriously. I counted once. There's also gratuitous amounts of violence, as it is a mobster movie, as well as a gross amount of drug content and nudity. But, other than being rated R for every reason, it's a good movie because of the story.

The movie is based on the true story of Richie Roberts and how he brought down Frank Lucas, Drug Lord of Harlem, and how the two banded together while Lucas was in prison to arrest over 100 crooked cops who were in the drug scene as well.

The film opens (after a man is tied to a chair, set on fire, then shot in the head several times) with Frank and his old boss, Bumpy Johnson, walking down the street as Bumpy is telling Frank the hard truths of life, that America's turning into a giant middleman. Buying things from someone else, selling them to companies for more than they paid for it, then selling it to the customer for more than they paid for it. He says it's simply unAmerican. These words hit a cord with Frank, and he decides to adopt a new business strategy for his heroin business.

Frank's cousin's ex-husband is in the navy stationed in Bangkok, and he uses this connection to go over and meet with an Opium Lord, saying he'll pay if he can bring a huge amount of heroin over to America. Since Frank bought from the source he is able to charge half the price his competitors are charging, for a product that's twice as "good."

Being in the game for as long as Frank Lucas is, he starts getting to know everyone in every circle. He knows which cops are the ones that will confiscate your drugs, steal them from the evidence room, cut it down to 10% what it was, and sell it back to the dealers, making a huge profit. Frank knows that these cops are running his fellow drug dealers out of business, so he does what he can do to bring down those cops while he's still outside of prison.

There are a few things I need to say: Drugs are bad, (mmkay?) and I'm not saying anything that Frank Lucas did in the drug trade was good, I'm only saying some of the things I noticed in the movie could be applied to our spiritual lives.

Frank is devoted to his people, to his family, his country. We should be this committed to our own families, our church families, and our community. We are all one body with many parts, so if one of us is hurting the whole will be hurting.

The story of American Gangster is a giant story of redemption. Frank destroyed hundreds of lives, by continuing the drug trade. By giving someone who is already strung out on the cut down heroin someone twice as good for half the cost is just going to make them more and more dependent on it, and it's only a matter of time before they OD and then it's not just one life he's ended, but a family he's destroyed. There's a scene in the movie where it shows a bunch of people all shooting up, and one part of this montage has a baby sitting on a bed, with someone laying sprawled out on the bed next to them, possibly dead. The baby is crying and someone else comes in the room and takes the baby out as it screams its lungs out. Awful.

But Frank, after having taken a step back to look at the horrible things he'd done, was able to help Richie arrest more than 100 cops who weren't doing there job, because they wanted the drug trade to continue: it kept them in business. Frank did what he could to try and slow down the barreling train of drugs, and he took a pretty big dent out of the New York/New Jersey section when he chose to work with Richie instead of against him for once.

Next week... oh my... oh my... American Pie...