Critic's Grade: C-

Some filmmakers don't seem to understand the connection between character and circumstance in a morality tale. When a film bears a message, more often than not that message is related to the audience through a central player whose experiences we can relate to on one level or another. But take away our relationship with this person, and the overall bond with the film's undercurrent is destroyed. Some films will attempt to shake us up through sensory assault, which is admirable but largely ineffective in almost all attempts. Sadly, Charles Stone III's "Paid in Full" attempts to shock us, but fails to move us.

The film tells the fictional stories of three actual drug dealers who lived out their days in the wild streets of Harlem in the 1980's. Ace (Wood Harris), Mitch (Mekhi Phifer), and Calvin (Kevin Carroll), go way back together, spending their evening eating take-out and betting thousands of dollars on whether or not one of them can make a shot to the trash can from the table with the leftover bags. Told mostly from Ace's point of view, we revert back to a year earlier, where we see his hard work in a family shop squandered in the wake of his dabbling in the sale of narcotics. Once he becomes good at it, he and his two pals eventually team up to become a driving, dominant force in Harlem's drug community.

But then comes Ace's attack of conscience, and that's where "Paid in Full" fails to pull its punches. Up to this point and beyond, the film is pretty much your standard drug dealer drama/gang flick aimed squarely at an African American audience and those with a penchant for annoyingly loud rap music and car stereos that could reset one's heartbeat if inside. Not to sound racial or anything- in fact, what I'm getting at is far from it- but Stone's film quickly becomes an exercise in redundancy, as well as a game of "Let's See How Many Times We Can Say the 'F' and 'N' Words." I hate street slang in real life, and if it serves little purpose in as film other than to simply exist because it can and it's not going anywhere, then I have no use for it here.

But the real problem concerns the extreme lack of interest behind the character of Ace. There's never any pull into his emotional undercurrents as he begins to experience the more moral side of himself; there's no passion behind the camera, if you will, to allow us to fully breathe the dilemna of Ace's situation. The script is underwritten and poorly developed in its sense of narrative structure, jumping between past and present, from character to character, without any regard for coherence or logic. Despite some solid acting from Harris, Phifer, and Carroll, the characters never come alive as they should, while Stone drags the proceedings out, stretching his scenes' interest to their utmost limit, and then crossing the line into sheer boredom. Basically, what "Paid in Full" tries to accomplish with style alone, films like "Requiem for a Dream" and "Traffic" pulled of with both style and storytelling, to say nothing of their vastly superior characterization. In short, this experience never pays up.

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