Carlito's Way: Rise to Power (2005) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

As you can undoubtedly determine, this is a prequel to Carlito's Way, a noted Brian DePalma film about a aging gangster who is released from prison. He intends in good faith to go straight, but ultimately finds that a tragically difficult goal to achieve. Al Pacino brought Carlito to life as a savvy guy with a sense of dignity and honor, a bad guy who could have been a good guy with just a slight change in the prevailing winds.

The storyline behind The Rise to Power is a bit of a disappointment to me, because it is not really the kind of prequel I anticipated. I expected to see a story that explained how Carlito ended up in the joint, and then how he made the decision to try to go straight when he got out. I guess I'll have to keep waiting for that story, because Rise to Power is not a direct prequel, but a distant flashback that can best be described as another story featuring the same character. It shows Carlito at the very beginning of his criminal career. So, in effect, we now have Part 1 and Part 3 of Carlito's story, but Part 2 is missing. There's nothing wrong with that at all, except that I have always felt Carlito's Way to be a fine film, and that feeling whetted my appetite for the story which came immediately before it.

Of course, the disappointment described above has everything to do with the film I wanted it to be, and nothing to do with the quality of the film it really is. In fact, I enjoyed Rise to Power, despite the fact that it is very, very similar to Goodfellas. In fact, some scenes seem too similar to the famous Scorsese saga, although this film puts a different ethnic spin on the story. Do you remember those "gimmicky cast" remakes that were so popular on Broadway a couple of decades ago, like the all-black version of The Odd Couple, or the all-tone-deaf-dwarfs version of Song of Norway? I might have imagined that second one. Either that or I mixed it up with a Bjork concert. Anyway, the fad seems to have passed because you rarely see that kind of gimmick today, except maybe for Oliver Stone's version of Alexander with an all Irish-accented cast. The Rise to Power is something like a remake of Goodfellas with a multi-ethnic cast instead of the original all-Italian version. Jay Hernandez plays the young Carlito, basically taking on the Ray Liotta role from Goodfellas, and narrating throughout. The story takes place in the sixties, when heroin was first coming to Harlem, and it portrays the partnership between three criminals who met in the joint: a black man, a Puerto Rican, and an Italian mobster. Given the ethnic boundary lines in Northern Manhattan, these men form the perfect combination to distribute smack across the entire territory.

I have to say that it all comes together pretty well. Director Michael Bregman is not very experienced, but he learned a few things from studying DePalma and Scorsese, and he assembled this film effectively from his own screenplay. I liked his script. He used all the standard crime story elements, but he also layered in a complicated "sting" which was hidden from the audience, then he added some colorful and sometimes humorous details, and gave the main characters distinctive and interesting roles to play.

This film was originally made with an eye to theatrical distribution, but ending up going straight to video. That was probably the right decision financially, because I just don't see "theatrical blockbuster" written all over this, but it's definitely one of the best straight-to-vids I have seen. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to name a better one. I wasn't blown away, but I found it an easy watch. The film is not original, but it has a good plot, interesting major and minor characters, a good look, and solid performances. You might fairly compare it to the Warner Brothers crime films of the Cagney era, solid B-movie fare.

It just doesn't have anything to do with Carlito's Way.