Release Date: October 25, 2002
Starring: Wood Harris, Mekhi Phifer, Kevin Carroll, Esai Morales
Directed by: Charles Stone III
Written by: Matt Cirulnick, Thulani Davis
Distributed by: Miramax Films
MPAA Rating: R (violence, pervasive language, some strong sexuality, drug content)
Paid in Full is an entertaining movie, and it's not until afterward that you realize the movie is also staggeringly unoriginal. Modeled after the likes of the innumerable drug and crime stories to have graced the screen over the last decade, from Goodfellas to Blow, it offers audiences a somewhat more personal but still very predictable look at the rags-to-riches-to-rags arc that has become a staple of this subgenre.
It's at least a fairly impressive debut from the director, Charles Stone III, whose affinity for putting his camera in the faces of his actors as they sit on the front steps of their Harlem apartment buildings resembles a younger, crosstown Spike Lee. Much like Lee's 1989 film Do the Right Thing, Stone's movie is confined to a few blocks in a neighborhood in turmoil.
The Harlem in the movie, though, is the one in 1986, when the so-called cocaine epidemic was at its peak. Ace (Wood Harris), a dry cleaning clerk, covets the high life of his friends Mitch (Mekhi Phifer) and Calvin (Kevin Carroll), both of whom deal drugs in the neighborhood.
And then, on a routine laundry delivery, he gets his chance. A rich distributor named Lulu (Esai Morales) offers him the opportunity to make the same easy money, and before he knows it, Ace is up to his knees in the cocaine trade and sinking quickly.
Paid in Full is an interesting commentary on the responsibilities of money -- quite often, those who suddenly come into large sums lack the social skills necessary to spend it, as in the movie's opening scene: Ace, Mitch, and Calvin sit around a table, eating Chinese take-out, and tossing crumpled-up napkins into a wastebasket across the room at five thousand dollars a shot.
But most of the characters are so uninteresting, and the storyline so predictable, that the audience will find it hard to care. Ace has something resembling depth -- we know he starts out as a wage-earning clerk under a tough but sharp-minded boss played by an underused Chi McBride -- and Wood Harris's lanky posture and easygoing smile make him somewhat sympathetic to the viewer.
Ace advances the narrative with a Goodfellas-esque voice-over narration, a tactic that, much like in Ted Demme's 2001 drug film Blow, seems to have become as much apart of these kinds of movies as is the protagonist's inevitable fall from grace. In his attempts to make the movie more personal, though, director Stone only digs up the ghosts of better movies past.
And so he goes through the motions. Ace accumulates piles of cash, but there's hardly anything novel about this; and then, within the next 60 minutes, his carefully constructed Harlem drug empire begins to topple around him.
In some ways, Paid in Full represents the missing link of Steven Soderbergh's drug epic, Traffic. That film detailed the life cycle of cocaine, all the way from the Mexican cartels to the end-users in white, suburban America, but it never touched on Paid in Full's chosen subject: how the drugs got from the "importers" (the Catherine Zeta-Jones character in Traffic) to the inner city dealers.
There may be an oddly nostalgic appeal to this movie, since it is based on a true story, but even fans of Goodfellas and Blow in search of something new would be hard-pressed to enjoy this -- precisely because they've watched those earlier classics, from which Paid in Full effortlessly but relentlessly cribs its plot.
all contents © 2002 Craig Roush