Scarface (1983)

There are performances, and then there are eruptions. Al Pacino as Tony Montana is the latter. From the moment he appears on screen, chain-smoking and trading insults through a police interview in a refugee processing centre, you know you're watching something different. Something untamed. Pacino doesn't dial it up, he removes the dial entirely, and the result is one of the most volcanic, unforgettable turns in the history of American cinema.

Brian De Palma's Scarface is a lurid, neon-soaked tragedy, and it knows exactly what it is. This is not a film interested in quiet moments or studied restraint. It's operatic in the truest sense: grand gestures, thunderous confrontations, a score by Giorgio Moroder that wraps the whole gaudy spectacle in sheets of pulsing synth. The pastel excess of 1980s Miami, the grotesque marble opulence of Tony's mansion, the designer clothes draped over moral rot. Every frame is garish, and every bit of that garishness is deliberate. It's excess as art, and De Palma at his most boldly committed.

And the dialogue. Oliver Stone's script gives Pacino lines that have burrowed so deep into popular culture that they've almost become folklore. "Say hello to my little friend" is the famous one, of course, but the film is littered with moments of what I can only call Shakespearean gangster poetry. Snarled and spat with such raw, unfiltered intensity that they transcend quotation and become myth.

What the film is really doing, underneath all that noise and blood and cocaine, is showing the American Dream in its death throes. Tony Montana claws his way up from nothing, acquires everything the dream promises, and is consumed by it. The film doesn't just depict that corruption, it shows it vomiting blood all over the marble floors. There's a savage, almost satirical clarity to the whole thing.

I've thought about it a lot, and I couldn't give this five stars. As much as I love it, and I really do love it, there's something that keeps it just short of the transcendent. Tony Montana is electrifying, but he's also one-dimensional. He doesn't evolve, he escalates. There's no interior life, no quiet reckoning, none of the aching complexity you get from Pacino's best work. His relationship with Elvira, played by Michelle Pfeiffer with surface glamour and cool detachment, never quite catches fire emotionally. It has the look of a tragic romance without the soul of one. It's all id, no introspection.

Now, you could argue that's the point. Tony's downfall is entirely of his own making, a direct product of his arrogance and his inability to reflect or adapt. The one-dimensionality is the tragedy. I accept that argument. But when I think about Pacino in Carlito's Way, where he's playing a similar world but with so much more weariness and self-awareness, or when I think about Michael Corleone's slow, terrible transformation, I feel something deeper. Tony Montana, for all his mythic power, remains a force of nature rather than a fully human one. You watch him in awe. You rarely grieve for him.

De Palma has made films I'd rank alongside anything in American cinema. I've long admired his work, and The Untouchables shows another side of him entirely: disciplined, controlled, just as stylish but with more emotional architecture. Scarface is the opposite of controlled, and that's both its greatest strength and the thing that stops it reaching the very top shelf.

But here's the thing. None of that stops Scarface from being one of the greatest gangster films ever made. It's a cultural landmark, a performance for the ages, and a film that absolutely earns its place in the conversation alongside the very best of the genre. Four and a half stars, and not a fraction less. Just not quite perfection. But then, perfection was never really Tony Montana's style either.

Rating: ★★★★½  | Year: 1983  | Watched: 2025-08-17

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Brian De Palma: The Untouchables (1987) · Carrie (1976) · Carlito's Way (1993)
More with Al Pacino: Scent of a Woman (1992) · Cruising (1980) · Insomnia (2002) · Scarecrow (1973)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)