“Scarface,” starring Al Pacino as the titular, scenery-devouring character, seems to be enjoying a huge revival nowadays. But it’s really always been very popular ever since its 1983 release. Guys, especially, love it.
I love Mafia movies and crime movies. I loved “Goodfellas.” I loved “Heat.” But I fucking hated “Scarface.” I thought the movie was garbage the first time I saw it, and upon several re-viewings, I still do. The plot is old and tired, Pacino is awful, and everything in it is hackneyed and looks cheaper than it should. Which in a way sums up a lot of 80’s culture. But it still sucked ass.
Any other red-blooded, violence-lovin’ men think this way?
No. Certainly not. I reserve that for much worse movies. Even if Scarface isn’t as strong to me as, say, The Godfather or Once upon a time in America, it’s still Al Pacino with a tux and a mob and serving memorable lines.
Not on top of my list, but it was all right. Soundtrack was by Giorgio Moroder too, wasn’t it?
I thought it was pretty stupid when I finally got around to seeing it last year. But not bad – not like To Live and Die in L.A..
Scarface is loud and blatant and obvious and overlong and didn’t bother to bring sublety along in the first place so it could throw it out the window. But I can see why the famous moments are famous moments. Trouble is, they play just as well as out-of-context dialogue recitations (“Say hello…to ma littl’ frien’!”) as they do within the movie.
It wouldn’t surprise me, given that it’s a De Palma film, if he actually designed it to be a series of memorable pop culture moments as much as an interesting, organic film. It does for violence what Showgirls does for T&A – hypes it up to an absurd degree and shoves it back in the audience’s face to see how it reacts. (And it’s kind of interesting that it’s clicked with audiences in a way that Showgirls never did, given America’s love of violence/fear of sex in entertainment.)
In this particular role or in general? I will concede the former as I thought the movie was only okay but I am at a loss if you mean the latter. I love Al in all his scenery-chewing glory and cannot comprehend anyone who does not. He even made Devil’s Advocate an enjoyable movie; something not even Charlize Theron’s full frontal nudity would’ve done in his absence.
Pacino is and was a great actor, Scarface was not his greatest work.
The main reason, unfortunately, that this movie has garnered such acclaim amongst the hip late-twenties early-thirties folks is because it is about a drug dealer. Plain and simple. Thugs, dealers, users, junkies, and culture-leeches all see this movie as being a “small time dealer makes it big” type of movie. Nothing more.
It’s also cool to like this movie, since many street thugs like it, it lends cred.
I didn’t hate it at all, but I do hate that it encourages people to build up drug empires and go out like men.
Mindless fools that idolize the drug culture, feel it necessary to have a Scarface poster on their wall. It’s a badge of honor for idiots who love the drug culture and know almost nothing about film.
I thought it was like most movies which Oliver Stone (or Francis Ford Coppola) wrote, thinking itself deeper than it is and yet drawing in the grand majority of male geekdom to adore it regardless.
I hate pretty much all Mafia type movies, or movies about drug dealers. So apparently you’re not alone in hating this movie, but it seems like those of us that don’t care for it do so for different reasons.
scarface is like a cartoon. the accent is overcooked, the acting is, too…it’s memorable and it’s leeched its way into pop culture through sportscenter and video games like grand theft auto.
It is first and foremost a Brian De Palma movie. You’re not going to get something as fully fleshed out as, say, a Scorcese movie.
When I consider his work, say, Untouchables, Femme Fatale, Carlitto’s Way, and Scarface, they are all, to use a clichè, lesser than the sum of their parts.
Think about Untouchables. . .what do you remember? A great movie, or “just like a goddamn wop to bring a knife to a gun fight” and De Niro with the bat, and Connery shooting the dead guy.
The characters are caricatures, larger than life. They have great quotes, and heroic scenes, tremendous falls from grace, noble deaths, self-destruction. They’re all motivated by greed and lust and envy and fame.
But, none of that makes them great movies. They’re movies that I watch for memorable scenes and memorable quotes and on that level, I still think Scarface falls below some of these other ones.
As to Pacino as an actor. . .I was certainly cold on him for a while. He did the same character for about 5 movies there in the early-mid 90’s. I think he redeemed himself with Donnie Brasco and Insomnia.
Still, he has more range than De Niro, but nor nearly as much as Tom Hanks or Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
Really? The one with DeNiro? To steal a phrase from Trunk, talk about lesser than the sum of its parts. That’s one movie where the ending completely ruined it for me.
Oh, and Scarface? Eh. Not terrible in the sense of unwatchable, but not good either.
Thought it was ridiculous when it first came out. Netflixed it the other day to give it another shot, and it is still silly. Pacino’s accent was preposterous.
Not the greatest movie ever, certainly, but hate it? Well, to each his own.
In a previous thread on this subject I mentioned that the de Palma Scarface and Showgirls were quite similar in theme: persons from disadvantaged backgrounds living out a twisted version of the American dream. I see that Interrobang! has picked up on these similarities as well.
I guess I can see why some might hate Scarface: it’s operatic, and opera is rarely subtle, it’s deliberately and aggressively tacky, and on the surface (but really only on the surface) it appears to glorify drug/gangster culture. I don’t have any problem with Pacino’s performance; he’s supposed to be an obnoxious asshole, he plays a clearly-defined character that is not in fact Al Pacino, and I find the over-the-top performances and set design perfectly appropriate as a representation of how Tony Montana sees himself, and of his life. While I agree with the criticisms here that de Palma’s films are often less than the sum of their parts, I also feel that, for better or worse, the director and star got exactly what they wanted up on the screen, and that the result is fairly interesting, even if I don’t necessarily agree with all their choices.
As has been noted, you have to approach a DePalma movie from a pretty particular perspective. Unless he’s just doing a job for hire–Mission: Impossible–his movies are more about HOW he presents the material–and how we read it–than they are about the material itself. He’s as unapologetically postmodern a filmmaker as Tarantino, Von Trier, or Verhoeven. Scarface (1983) isn’t a movie about gangsters; it’s a movie about gangster movies.
Primarily, above all else, IMO, it’s a love letter to the godfather of all godfather movies, Howard Hawks’s gangster masterpiece–still the greatest (and one of the first) gangster movie ever made–*Scarface *(1932). If you’ve only seen the remake, you should track down the original. Last I checked it was completely unavailable except as a bonus in the Scarface 83 DVD box. Which should tell you something right there: DePalma considers *Scarface 83 *more of a commentary on Scarface 82 than a replacement. He wants you to see both.
I kind of watch Scarface 83 as DePalma’s meditation on all that’s changed in filmmaking–and in that of which filmmaking is a reflection, “society”–in the 50 years since Hawks made Scarface 32. It’s fascinating to watch 83 with 32 fresh in your memory. I haven’t done this in a while, so I don’t really have any specific examples to offer right now, but it seems very clear to me that DePalma is going: “See? *This *has changed, and *that *has changed.” In other words, the differences in the two versions don’t seem to be in service to marketability or “improvement” or anything like that: each change DePalma makes seems like a pointed comment on the real-world changes that have made the cinematic change necessary. It’s almost as if DePalma was imagining what Howard Hawks would have made of the eighties.
But yeah, DePalma’s approach to filmmaking means that there’s going to be a divorce between the surface of a film and the ideas he’s exploring. This disconnect fascinates me, and is one of the major common threads in the work of some of my favorite directors, but it’s not an approach the majority of moviegoers seem to have time to engage with. IOW, I’d be the first to agree that DePalma is kind of sabotaging his audience’s experience to a great degree by making movies whose appreciation tends to require a proportional amount of “homework” and contextual experience. But that’s my particular geekdom; YMMV.
Like Showgirls, for most people Scarface 83 works mostly as camp (or uncomplicated sex/violence, respectively) unless you’re interested in masturbatory deconstruction.
I watched Scarface for the first time several years ago. It is certainly a very famous movie and I figured I was missing some important U.S. film moment or experience not having seen it.
After it was over, my first reaction was that’s it? That’s what everyone is talking about? Seemed like a pretty stupid movie to me. I didn’t hate it (maybe 2 or 2.5 stars out of 5), but I got tired of Pacino’s shtick real fast. As has been mentioned in this thread, the movie played out as more of a sequence of in-your-face set pieces rather than something more cohesive and interesting.
In one way I’m glad I did watch it. I probably would have picked up last year’s DVD Special Edition release on a blind buy. That would have been a waste of coin.