Rico paid in full full#
Paid in Full earns that place not through innovation-there isn’t a single story beat, character type, or visual trope in it that we haven’t all seen a hundred times-but through sheer force of talent and complete emotional commitment to the material. When Ace cheers on Tony’s kill-crazy rampage as Mitch goes all-out for his money, Stone is at once re-enacting ’80s reality in fictional form, casting a critical eye on the glamorization of thug-and-drug life peddled by both hip hop and Hollywood, and asserting his own film’s place in the gangster-movie pantheon. These rappers created their recording personas by fusing the street legends of their adolescence, the gangster movies they loved, and much-speculated-upon degrees of first-hand experience in the process, they brought a new level of emotional and lyrical complexity to so-called “gangsta rap.” Stone and his collaborators traced the rappers’ stories back to their source (Cirulnick and Davis worked from an earlier script co-written by the real AZ, aka Azie Faison) and closed the circle: Paid in Full is the cinematic equivalent of Ready to Die and Reasonable Doubt, and one of the best crime films in years. The trio’s real-life exploits would later become important source material for New York’s next generation of hip hop MCs, including the great triumvirate of Nas, Biggie, and Jay-Z. Paid in Full is based on the true story of 1980s Harlem cocaine kingpins AZ (Ace in the movie), Rich Porter (Mitch), and Alpo (Rico, played by the rapper Cam’ron). Stone and his screenwriters, Matthew Cirulnick and Thulani Davis, are playing on multiple levels of reference here. This is intercut with a fast-paced, brutal scene of Ace’s friend Mitch (Mekhi Phifer) stalking and killing a thug who robbed one of Mitch’s workers. The Uptown crowd loses their minds, stomping and hollering as Pacino’s coke-fueled Tony Montana makes his last stand.
)Įarly on in Charles Stone III’s 2002 crime drama Paid in Full, there’s a scene where Ace (Wood Harris), a straight-and-narrow young man beginning to succumb to the allure of drug dealing, goes to see De Palma’s Scarface remake in a Harlem theater.
( Paid in Full is available on DVD and Blu-ray.
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