Now this is a way cool movie. It’s got some great lines.

So your success took a shot at you. What are you gonna do now? How you gonna kill it? You’re gonna become unsuccessful? Frank, we can be successful and have enemies, right? Or we can be unsuccessful, too, you know, we can have friends.

I’m not the most successful person on the planet, but I recognize the truth of these words. This line made the entire movie for me.

There’s the way the movie progresses with the Vietnam War in the background, on TV. That’s cool, because the Vietnam War was in the background for my childhood- on TV. Then there’s the music- the soul music is right on.

Perhaps the coolest thing about this movie is that it’s actually being sued by the police, who feel that it portrays them badly. This gets to the question of whether or not the story is fact or fiction. I’m agnostic on this point- although movie seemed plausible to me. Sometimes fiction is truer than fact anyway. This isn’t a newsreel, for Pete’s sake. If the police are suing, then why not the army as well? The army is complicit in the heroin being smuggled. Why isn’t the army suing? Maybe because it’s an established fact that someone in the army was complicit in the heroin smuggled in.

There’s overtones of Afghanistan too, when the Asian poppy grower says

Opium plants are hard enough to outlive any war. They’ll still be here long after the troops have gone.

We managed to kick out those nasty Taliban from Afghanistan, and afterwards there was a record poppy harvest. If you were a cynic, you might even say that those Talibans were bad for business, and that’s why they had to go. I don’t know, I’m just talking. That’s another interesting thing about this movie- the references to heroin being just another business. Oh, you see nasty shots of overdoses, but then I had a professor that claimed broadcast radio waves kill people.

That’s another interesting aspect of this movie- the honest cop stays poor. You see him making potato-chip sandwiches while the bad guys are carving up turkeys. No one can understand why the honest cop turns in the million bucks.

I love gangster movies. Kudos to Ridley Scott, for updating the genre. Yes, it echoed a lot of other gangster flix, but it was original enough for me.