Telling a true story doesn't excuse a filmmaker from making his movie stand out from the many others that have traversed similar ground.

Best of all, there are top-flight performances from both Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe who create interesting, rounded characters out of potential clichés.

Scott's not interested in fireworks but small implosions of the soul and ego.

Scott evokes the crime cinema of the seventies with his mix of gritty police thriller and sprawling crime epic (with a sprinkling of blaxploitation excess).... But its roots are equally in the rise-and-fall gangster thrillers of the eighties and nineties.