Sugar Hill is Carlito's Way to New Jack City's Scarface, But Extremely Boring
You’d think that people would be eager to get into business with Wesley Snipes and screenwriter Barry Cooper Michael after New Jack City, which Cooper co-wrote and Snipes starred in, was a surprise hit that kicked off a Neo-Blaxploitation wave.
Yet studio after studio passed on Cooper’s script for Sugar Hill even with the red-hot Snipes in the lead role of ruminative drug dealer Romello "Rome" Skuggs and it ended up getting funded through indie production company Beacon Communications.
I can see why studios might look at the script for Sugar Hill and be skittish despite the groundbreaking success of New Jack City. Sugar Hill may share a star, a screenwriter, a genre and a whole lot of themes with the earlier hit but it is a much different movie and a much less commercial proposition.
Sugar Hill is Carlito’s Way to New Jack City’s Scarface. Where Scarface and New Jack City are electric and exciting, vibrating with life and wonderfully kinetic Carlito’s Way and Sugar Hill are slower and more meditative. They’re stories about world weary men who have lived their lives outside the law and want to leave all of that ugliness and bloodshed behind.
The crucial difference is that Carlito’s Way is a great film and an eminently worthy companion piece to Scarface while Sugar Hill isn’t even particularly good.
The film’s ambitions are admirable and audacious but the filmmakers do not succeed in realizing an expansive cinematic vision.
Cooper and director Leon Ichaso set out to make a different kind of black crime drama. They aimed high. To the film’s commercial detriment, they did not want to make New Jack City 2. Instead they wanted to make an old-fashioned crime movie in the mold of The Godfather with some little 1930s gritty crime melodrama thrown in.
Sugar Hill is an unusually quiet crime drama. The problem is that in its many meditative moments Sugar Hill isn’t just restrained; it’s positively sleepy, a film that subconsciously wants to lull audiences into dream land, where they can be a pirate or a princess or someone watching New Jack City instead.
The ambitious, underwhelming drama has two modes: too dramatic and not dramatic enough. It’s either too big or not big enough.
Sugar Hill opens way too big and way too dramatic, with Snipes’ anti-hero thinking back to the worst moments in a life full of them. In it, his heroin-addicted mother pleads for her boys to help her shoot the heroin into her veins that will kill her almost instantly, with both Rome and his brother Raynathan "Ray" Skuggs (Michael Wright) looking on helplessly.
Arthur Romello "A.R." Skuggs (Clarence Williams III) does not suffer a fatal heroin overdose despite his own addiction to heroin but he experiences a life much worse than death as a dope-addicted shell of a man whose spirit was broken when he was at shot at repeatedly by a mob that took pity and spared his life.
Considering the shambles A.R made out of his woeful existence the mafia might have been doing him and the world a favor by putting him out of his misery.
Rome watched all of this transpire as a deeply traumatized child and teenager. It marked him for life. But instead of wanting to bring down drug dealers like the ones whose poison murdered his mother and psychologically and spiritually destroyed his father he got into the drug game himself.
Selling poison to his people has made Rome rich but miserable. He dresses in the finest clothes. He lives in a massive apartment. He is able to exist in the straight world as well as the criminal underground.
But he is tired. Rome is existentially exhausted. He just doesn’t have the stomach for killing people or having people killed or acting as a general in gang wars with ruthless adversaries like Lolly Jonas (Ernie Hudson), a former boxer who traded in the Sweet Science for peddling junk.
So he decides to get out of the dope game and go straight alongside gorgeous actress girlfriend Melissa (Theresa Randle). This puts Rome at odds with a skittish brother who doesn’t want to leave criminality behind because it’s all he’s ever known and, inevitably, all he will ever know.
To put things in Goodfellas terms, Wright is playing the Joe Pesci breakout scene-stealing character of the combustible, loudmouth wild card who is a perpetual threat to himself and everyone around him while Snipes is playing the Ray Liotta role.
There are, however, some key differences beyond Sugar Hill being yet another film that desperately wants to be Goodfellas and falls short. The role of Henry Hill is an incredibly juicy one that Liotta was perfect for.
The same is not true, unfortunately, of the lead role in Sugar Hill. What’s the point of casting an actor as charismatic, flashy and magnetic as Snipes if you’re never going to let him show off? It’s not Snipes’ fault, ultimately, but rather the nature of a thankless role that mainly calls upon him to sit and look thoughtful and pensive while wearing clothes that must have cost thousands of dollars.
The film’s fatal flaw is that Wright is nowhere near as compelling, raw and exciting as it desperately needs him to be. He’s not Joe Pesci. He’s not even Cam’ron in Paid in Full. He’s not a scene stealer. He’s someone from whom scenes are stolen.
It’s a role that calls for someone exactly like Snipes. Unfortunately Snipes was already busy playing the lead. Snipes’ movie star magnetism just makes Wright seem even more inadequate and inferior by comparison. Snipes would have devoured a role like that but the lead in Sugar Hill seems to bore him to the point that he has difficulty staying awake. Let’s just say that there was a reason that the Blade star’s nickname on set was “Sleepy Snipes.”
In keeping with its tasteful tedium, instead of the requisite youth-friendly soundtrack full of top Hip Hop and R&B hits Sugar Hill is dominated by the lonely horn of composer Terence Blanchard. Blanchard, who had just broken into film composing with the audacious one two punch of Jungle Fever and Malcolm X gives the proceedings a moody, jazzy texture. It’s downbeat, sad and atmospheric. At first it’s extremely effective but it grows less winning once it becomes apparent that the filmmakers want the score to determine the tone and carry the movie in lieu of action and spectacle.
There’s so little action in Sugar Hill that it seems inapt, if not downright inaccurate, to refer to it as an action movie instead of a drama. It’s closer to an inaction movie than an action movie.
Sugar Hill is tricky because I know exactly what the filmmakers were trying to do just as I also know that they fall far short of those admirable ambitions.
This wasn’t like other black crime films from the era: it it’s simultaneously classier and way more boring.
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