Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington play characters living separate lives, and each is interesting in their right. When their two stories start to converge, the movie only gets more interesting than it already was. When they finally came face to face, I felt a bit disappointed. All the action built up to that moment, but somehow the camaraderie that the two characters found felt false in light of their characters motivations and histories.
What led up to that point truly was an epic tale of two flawed men with principles in divergent worlds that were quickly moving away from those values.
Washington is getting all the press, but Crowe is just as good or better as the cop after Washington's gangster of the title. The gangster doesn't require Denzel to do much different from what he has already done in past roles (but really, does anyway do it better?) except with more brutality, but Crowe's role is unique to the actor. He displayed similar qualities before, but he made his character feel completely new to me. He's no Serpico, but he's a cop for the books.
I marveled at how the movie vilified and honored Washington's gangster. His rise was glorious. He picked his family up by his bootstraps. They finally got a piece of the pie. He also dragged them down with him and took away any promise for a long, happy life that any of them had.
He was also a dealer of death whose handiwork led to the death of thousands. Even though that gets mentioned both in sight and sound, I thought the film was less concerned with that than it should have been.
Perhaps the best thing the movie can say is how the world is changin' and leaving the old guard, villains and heroes, behind.
****
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