American Gangster (Edición extendida) [DVD]

In the early 1970s, corrupt cops were plentiful on the streets of New York. The Vietnam War was ravaging the East and the United States. Many soldiers returned home dead or addicted to an opiate called heroin, which they shared with young people eager to experience new things and who became hooked on the drug. With the help of law enforcement, the mafia operated with almost total impunity in this competition-free market. A few privileged and untouchable white men paid hundreds of millions of dollars to judges, lawyers and police officers in New York so that no one would open their mouths and that profitable relationship would be maintained. Nobody dared with the tentacles of Cosa Nostra. Until a black businessman named Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) showed up. Nobody noticed Frank , the quiet assistant of Bumpy Johnson, one of the main bosses of the black mafia after the Vietnam War. Frank Lucas took advantage of the hole opened in the power structure by the sudden death of his boss to build his own empire and create his version of the “American success.” Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) is a tough cop, used to the streets, who soon realizes that control of the underworld is changing hands. He believes that someone is rising above the well-known mafia families and begins to suspect that a black trafficker has come out of nowhere to take over the situation. Both Lucas and Roberts are based on a very rigorous ethical code that differentiates them from the rest of their contemporaries. They are two lonely figures on opposite sides of the law, but the fate of the two men will cross as a confrontation approaches that will not only change their lives, but will alter the course of an entire generation of New Yorkers.

"It is one of the great films of 2007" Fotogramas
"A perfect narrative in images" Metropolis, the World.
"A brutal and brilliant film" Pete Hammond, Maxim