12. The Preppie Connection
Box office: $7,138
Based on real events dating back to 1984 when a Connecticut prep-school student was arrested for smuggling 300 pounds of coke from Colombia, The Preppie Connection gets its name from a 60 Minutes segment. Thomas Mann plays Tobey Hammel, the new kid at Sage and who quickly gets caught up in the drug scene there. Tobey takes the initiative to travel to Cartegena, where he finds a connection. Like most smuggling stories, the high times don't last. But Joseph Castelo's depiction of a naive but determined entrepreneur is steady and thought-provoking, with just a hint that lives are unnecessarily lost due to the drug war.
