Game Over is supposed to be a documentary about three drug dealers (AZ, Richard Porter, and Alpo) who dominated the Harlem narcotics scene in the mid-late 1980s. The three guys who the movie focused on were the inspiration for the 2002 Mekhi Phifer / Wood Harris (The Wire, Remember The Titans) movie, Paid In Full. I liked Paid, so I was interested to see the non-fiction version of the story. Unfortunately, the original movie was about 10 times more informative and complete than the documentary, a pretty rare occurrence.

This “documentary” was terrible. There is really no other word for it. It was only 45 minutes long and looked like somebody made it for a high school level video editing class. The camera work was ridiculous. Sometimes, during an interview, the cameraman would seem to get bored and would start zooming in and out on random things in the background.

The film is narrated by Jadakiss (yea, the rapper), and that is our first sign that things aren’t going to be pretty. Game Over is a compilation of interviews with mostly random people that either knew or simply knew of AZ, Alpo, or Rich. It doesn’t seem to be too illogical that some of the people who are interviewed would be narcotics users themselves, given the subject matter of the film, but there was one guy, who was never really identified, who was missing half of his front teeth and really looked like they had just pulled him out of a crack house. It made me question his reliability just a tad. A lot of the interviews seemed to be comprised of people just recalling neighborhood gossip and tall tales they heard 20 years ago. I thought about including an example of this ridiculousness, but this movie was riddled with so many N-bombs that it would be more than a little inappropriate for a white guy to post it on his blog.

One of the lone strengths of the film is the series of interviews done with AZ, the only one of the three who isn’t in prison or dead. It is interesting to get his perspective on what went down, even though he really just focuses on a couple of events rather than a broader spectrum of their era of control, which I think would have helped the film’s depth and organization tremendously. Also, I think they missed on a really good opportunity in their interviews with Rich Porter’s sister. About a third of the movie is footage of an interview with her, where she recalls the kidnapping of her little brother (Donnell) and the death of her older brother (Rich). She spends about 10-12 minutes talking about her little brothers kidnapping, then just throws in at the end about 30 seconds on Rich’s (one of the three focuses of the movie), death. The story about her little brother was an important anecdote to include, because it shows the danger that the jealousy of those close you can pose to people of power, but it really took up WAAAYYY too much of the movie.

All in all, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, go rent Paid In Full. Even if you like Paid, stay away from Game Over. I felt like I wasted 45 minutes of my life and one of my rentals from Blockbuster.

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