Review of Maria Full of Grace (2004) by Dana M — 21 Jul 2008

Maria is a 17 year old girl living with her family in Colombia when she decides to quit her job at the a rose plantation. This doesnâ??t leave her with many options, as she has to have a job in order to live but no jobs are likely to be better than the one she had at the plantation.

That is true until she meets a man who says that she can make a lot of money being a drug mule. She swallows 63 pellets of cocaine and is put on a plane to New York. On the plane she meets 3 other mules including her friend.

In an excellently crafted scene on the airplane one of the girls begins to get sick and Maria wonders if something has gone wrong with her as well. She sweats profusely and is in constant agony. The tension is ramped up even more as she is interrogated by customs after landing.

You realize how little her bosses care about her in that scene as they have not prepared her in any way for a customs interrogation. It is like they forget her as a lost cause at that point. She isnâ??t treated any better in New York by the people assigned to recover the drugs from her.

The sick girl continues to get worse and Maria wakes up alone in the room with her friend and the bathtub is covered with blood. They both run from the room and the rest of the plot deals with her trying to clean up her mess.

The beautiful Catalina Sandino Moreno plays Maria as a confident and aggressive young woman who doesnâ??t have the world figured out as much as she thinks she does. She clearly gets in over her head in New York but she is determined and level headed enough to fight through the situation.

I thought the story had more room for some much more intense drama and the end was a little sappy, but overall this story of this young woman making and living with life altering decisions is very compelling.