Scarface - 1983

First line of the review here I will admit that I probably have seen this but I don't remember it and there's a good chance I might not have ever seen it. This type of film was never quite up my alley even though it's very well-known and regarded. I was never a big Pacino fan and until now I've never really cared about Brian De Palma or really even known who he was.

Al Pacino stars in this lengthy biopic feeling crime drama about a Cuban small-time criminal who gets brought to the United States and begins to take over the drug trade there. Pacino got very well recognized for this role and it is perhaps one of the most iconic roles of all time which I expected, but I did not understand that it was made to be mostly sympathetic of him.

What we have is a very long very detailed color map of who's who in the drug trade, and we're introduced to Pacino's family being his mom and his sister. We don't know much about Pacino's Tony Montana. Montana is a mystery man. We are led to believe that he was probably a small time drug dealer and criminal in Cuba.

We don't learn much about him either. Most of this movie is him chasing his goal of being number one in his particular trade. From the very beginning he makes it very clear what success will look like to him. It will be a specific girl, it will be a specific job, and it will be a specific amount of money. He only has those things he wants to achieve. And when he gets there, he begins to unravel because it's not what he imagined.

I don't know much about the story source but it clearly draws on Al Capone and other well-known criminals as inspiration for Tony Montana. He makes the classic mistakes in his ascension to the top, including using his own drugs and mistrusting everybody and biting off more than he can chew.

We are shown many ways which this career choice will go for the people involved, and it usually ends at one end of a smoking gun. Tony is highly possessive of his sister and he is combating a couple different other drug runners, and this all boils to the head in the last 45 minutes. At 2.5 hours this was long, and I think some could be cut but honestly most of its necessary. It's a character piece and we need to spend time with the character and we need to spend time in his surroundings in order to understand him.

This doesn't feel like the Brian DePalma I've been watching, it's not sexual or perverse, it doesn't bathe in its own slime or even indulge in stylistic flourishes. Instead it leaves the style to Pacino, who is great. He's awesome. Pacino is constrained, he's shifty, he's paranoid, he's tightly wound. He plays the role of a highly unpredictable character and his acting I would say is also highly unpredictable. I love in the last half the movie as he is disintegrating, how he slouches, appears zombie like and half dead, only to then explode into violent confrontation.

Scarface has a very huge following and a gigantic list of top movie lists it is on. I'd say it's really good. For me, it's not one I'd put in my top 10 or even top 50, but it's very admirable and certainly peak filmmaker style.

I will give it a 4.5