I have to give this 6 stars just because it managed to elicit so much emotion from me...
I sure hope Rodney is still building homes for Habitat for Humanity, because otherwise he's just a giant piece of filth that should be locked away in prison. His wife is an unrepentant, unsympathetic, spoiled brat. "Oh woe is me, I have to live in a double-wide trailer." Sad fact is I'm sure that Rodney is back to doing construction just simply to support his spoiled brat of a wife.
Here's the nutshell... A hippie named Julian, who doesn't care about materialistic goods and lives a subsistence-living type of life, finds a duffel bag of coke on a beach in Puerto Rico, and buries it because he wants nothing to do with it. He then goes on to tell a bunch of people about the story, and one of them is a greedy, naive idiot named Rodney who decides he's going to go down there with his drug-addict friend--who he most likely buys pot from--to dig it up. Along the way, they meet a low-level dealer named Dee who agrees to sell it on the street level for them. Well, Dee gets pulled over by the cops, and wisely decides to snitch on Rodney. The local sheriff's department, along with homeland security, get Rodney hooked up with an undercover agent he believes is named Carlos. Rodney is the most gullible, greedy, idiotic criminal in history, and so after he's clearly setup to be busted the first time around, but like an absolute idiot didn't have the wherewithal to bring a shovel with him to dig the rugs up, still goes along with this plan, and eventually gets arrested after willfully importing several dozen kilograms of cocaine into the country under the hopes of using Dee to sell it. The sappy judge decides since Rodey (a fat, middle-aged white guy) has no prior convictions, no criminal history, decides to waive the minimum mandatory sentence and gives Rodney 60 days in jail with 5 years probation and community service--after he's just imported enough coke to burden and create dozens upon a dozens of addicts as part of his "American Dream". Rodney then goes on to claim that he was entrapped and that the department of homeland security probably never actually dug up the drugs, because he obviously has no remorse and is just sour that he got caught.
I have absolutely no sympathy for Rodney or his wife. They kept talking about this being "The American dream" throughout the documentary. I'm an American, and I never dreamed about addicting dozens if not hundreds of people to narcotics in an effort to support my spoiled brat of a wife who thought it was just atrocious to live in a double-wide trailer--a living situation that many Americans would give anything for. He had no thought of the damage that he was going to do to other people, and his stupid spoiled brat of a wife has the nerve to say, "It's all bullshit, they should have put the real drug addicts in jail." She literally had the nerve to sit there and bawl because they went from a big fancy house to a double-wide trailer that, was in her own words, "As big as our three-car garage." Literally the worst type of person.
I have to admit, that it raised a lot of emotion in me, which is the only reason I'm giving it a relatively high rating. None of it was sympathy for any of the protagonists. The only person that had any sense about him was Dee, the low-level street dealer that snitched on Rodney. That doesn't exactly make him a good person, but the idea that it tries to cast him as the villain and Rodney as just some naive good-hearted guy really pisses me off. He was willing to get countless people addicted to drugs. He's not a good guy, and he was damned lucky that the judge gave him such a light sentence.
So long story short, this documentary is good in the sense that it's a good enough story to have made me so mad. I'm sure other people's views on it will differ, but that's what makes it a good story. I would have liked to have heard that Rodney continued working for Habitat for Humanity, but given his greediness I'm sure that's no the case, and he's probably back to working to support his spoiled brat--and by that I mean his wife; his daughter seemed all right, if not clueless. Dee is the most likeable character (other than Andy for shear idiocy), and that's saying a lot considering he's a run-of-the-mill-drug-dealing thug. He's the quintessential "little fish", but Rodney was the big fish that the justice system decided to catch and release.
Long story short... This is one of the few documentaries that's ever made me feel more sympathetic to law enforcement than the perpetrator they arrested. This guy should have done hard time, but instead got off with a couple of months and probation. There are people in penitentiaries doing 10, 15, 20-some-odd years for dealing less drugs than this guy was involved with in dealing, and he's just very lucky he got some kind of sweet-heart deal from the judge. In my opinion, it was a total miscarriage of justice, and the fact that he has the nerve to go on about 'entrapment' and claim that homeland security staged the discovery of the rugs just shows me he's not remorseful, and that he would have gladly exploited countless drug addicts in an effort to fulfill his own greed.
Long story short... I wish that Julian would have never told anyone about the drugs, but he did, and this is what happened. Like it or hate it, it's a good story.
