Cynical Cinema

Lucy Liu is kind of hot. Not hot enough to carry a movie on her own, but kinda hot in a dominatrix, angrily-sexy-chick kind of way. And she can not carry Rise: Blood Hunter on her own. The cover of this movie makes it look like Blade, or Underworld, or Van Helsing, or any one of these vampire-hunter movies that have begun to crop up everywhere. But it isn’t. It’s much worse. You see, Lucy Liu is kinda-dominatrix-hot, and that’s it. She is not an excellent actress, she is just a passable actress in secondary roles. Remember Ecks vs. Sever? God knows I wish I didn’t. Rise: Blood Hunter also stars Michael Chiklis, most recently seen in The Shield and Fantastic Four, but still best-loved by all for The Commish. His character keeps showing up, but is given absolutely nothing to do in the film. His involvement in the final scene is irritating, since we just don’t care about him at all. But then, we don’t care about anyone else either.

Lucy Liu plays a reporter who is working on a story about a cult. She gets attacked by a vampire, and becomes one. She then sets out to destroy all vampires. In the process, she undergoes an instantaneous transformation from a meek, sad little weakling into a tough-talking, bad-ass little weakling. The lines here are painful. “Have mercy”. “Sorry, I’m fresh out just now.” Not only are you ripping off the line, you’re making it immeasureable worse. The movie is told in that disjointed narrative that Tarantino popularized with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, but the director clearly has no idea why that style is effective. He just thinks people seem to like that.

And then the bizarre cameos. Marilyn Manson shows up as a bartender, which I understand. It’s goth, it’s vampires, it’s Marilyn Manson. He can’t act at all, but at least the pieces fit. Then…Nick Lachey shows up for two minutes as some thug in the hood. Nicke Lachey? What? And there is nudity. Tons of female nudity, all the way through, much of it courtesy of Lucy Liu herself. However, it is all that obnoxious kind of nudity where you never get a full-frontal boob shot (except for that hooker at the very beginning), and therefore the camera has to go to some pretty strange angles to avoid showing everything at once. Your actress agreed to appear nude. You are showing her nipples anyway. Do you get a better rating if you show them only one at a time and from a side view? Come on. Rise: Blood Hunter is kind of worth it for the nudity, but if you’re that kind of pervert, Lucy Liu is also naked in City of Industry, full boobs, and the movie is much better.

There is a bit of controversy over the shutout of American Gangster at the Oscars. It was not nominated for best picture, and both Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington were shut out of the nominations for best actor. I understand the snub of Crowe. (Frankly, he deserves it more for 3:10 to Yuma than he does for this movie.) But the only reason I can think of for snubbing Washington is that he is too tailor-made for this part. You forget that he is an actor, because you’re watching Denzel Washington. As though it were a reality show about his life. If Denzel killed people and ran a drug empire and married Miss Puerto Rico, this would be exactly what his life would look like. The one role he has played to which I could compare this one was in Training Day, and he won the Oscar for that one. And here, he is better. That really is the strength of American Gangster, the performances.

Not just Washington, but Russell Crowe is reliably terrific as the cop tracking him down, and the supporting cast is remarkably good. The RZA, of the Wu-Tang clan, appears here, and as soon as I saw him I thought “oh, no! A rapper in a major role means this movie will start to hit Seagal territory in parts”. But the RZA is good. So is Armand Assante, who I love, and Josh Brolin as a crooked cop. Cuba Gooding Jr. is in the film also, and I absolutely hate Cuba Gooding Jr. However, he has maybe five lines, total, and wasn’t around long enough to irritate me. I also really like the inclusion of Clarence Williams III as Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson. Johnson was a real-life legendary gangster figure in New York, and he was the subject of the under-rated 1997 movie “Hoodlum”, where he was played by Lawrence Fishburne in one of the best roles of his career.

In American Gangster, Bumpy dies near the beginning, and his right-hand-man, chauffeur and gopher, Frank Lucas, is left a little adrift. Frank is played by Denzel Washington, and he has few choices. Now that his mentor is gone, he can either leave town and go back to his family, or work for someone else, or take matters into his own hands. Of course, he chooses the third option and rises to power as the number one dealer, importer and gangster in New York. He manages to exist on the periphery, away from the other gangsters, the corrupt cops, and the good cops. One of those good cops is Russell Crowe, who has been blackballed by his police department for being a good cop. In a few scenes very reminiscent of Serpico, he is left hanging because the other cops in the department feel that if a cop won’t take money, then he of course would turn in cops who do. But of course, it isn’t black-and-white. Washington is not all bad, Crowe is not all good, which of course happens in any great movie. And a lot of bad ones.

What really sets American Gangster apart, aside from the fantastic actors doing fantastic acting, is the style. Ridley Scott has managed to make some of the most visually appealing movies in history. (Check out his early work, like The Duellists, or Alien). Sometimes that goes off the rails and the movie suffers for the stylish makeup - think Hannibal, or Black Hawk Down. But in American Gangster, Scott seems to treat the whole movie almost like a period piece. Of all his movies, this one feels the most like The Duellists, both in it’s theme and it’s style. It moves along at a crackling pace on the backs of Washington and Crowe, and although it runs more than two and a half hours, you never have a sense of the time passing. Tremendously engaging and fantastically done.