If you ever wondered what you’d get if you take all the scenes from Scarface, the dialog from the Godfather, and the ending from Goodfellas, mixed them up, and spat them all out in a two-hour-and-forty-minute movie starring Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington, the answer is American Gangster.

Crowe is decent but seems to struggle (understandably) with the difficulty of faking a New York accent. Washington’s acting is as flat as ever, but with age catching up to him he doesn’t have his looks to make up for it.

The cinematography is as stunning as anything I would expect from Ridley Scott, but sadly his directing really let me down. As with any movie running past the two hour mark, I felt this one could have been cut down significantly and yielded a more likable result. Plus, I expect acting faults to be corrected by a director. Of course Washington’s acting is really a fault that should have been corrected during casting.

To be frank, the best part of the movie was the trailer for Rambo. The sound of laughter and disbelief from an audience mocking a sixty-one year old man acting out a jungle fantasy was priceless.