This month’s Alien: Covenant marks Ridley Scott’s 24th feature film in what has been a long, influential, albeit uneven and sometimes flat out maddening career. From the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, Ridley Scott’s oeuvre is as inconsistent in quality as his late brother Tony’s was consistent in aesthetics and tone. He has his strengths – world building and managing epic scope – and his weaknesses – creating three-dimensional characters. These aspects aren’t always true, but they are more consistent than anything in his career.
Digging through Scott’s entire filmography, spanning epic classics and replacement-level thriller dreck, it was tough to try and rank some of the lesser works above the each other. But with careful viewing I began to disseminate just how much effort Scott was putting into his craft from movie to movie. It helped shape a list top heavy with older films and, unfortunately, a heap of Scott’s most recent work filling out the bottom of this list.
Here we go…
4. American Gangster (2007)
Scott’s 2007 true-crime epic would probably find itself lower on most lists of his work. But don’t sleep on this one, a story told in familiar settings with freshness and confidence lacking in so many of Scott’s more recent pictures. It belongs in the conversation with the best gangster films of the 21st century, however slim that list may ultimately be.
Russell Crowe plays Richie Roberts, a police officer as corrupt in his personal life as he is straight-edged in his professional. In fact, it’s his reluctance to take a stack of cash which puts him at odds with the rest of the policemen in his precinct. Eventually, Richie finds himself up against Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), an entrepreneur who almost single-handedly introduced heroin to the inner city. As subdued as Crowe is, Washington is his typical self, ratcheting up from quiet calm to volcanic and violent.
The material is a departure for Scott, having never done a traditional crime drama before, and the all-encompassing strength of American Gangster makes me wish he’d try his hand in this world again.
