Enjoyable but Flawed

Rating: 5/10 (10 June 2006)

I finally saw this for the first time after years of hearing how good it was, and though it was certainly entertaining and very watchable, I came away thinking that it's a far from great film. Perhaps having already seen pretty much every other good gangster movie before having seen this one, I kept thinking that the Godfather, Goodfellas, Carlito's Way etc just blow it away... maybe if I'd seen Scarface before any of those, I'd think the opposite. But there are other reasons: More than any other gangster flick, it really is a film of its time, the 80s, which is great as far as it goes, but personally, I found a lot of it too staged and stylised - the scene where Tony goes to kill Frank and the cop coming to mind, it just seems overlong and ultimately disappointing; all you want is for him to go in and blow them away, but it's just really drawn out and then somehow when he does shoot them, it seems like a real anticlimax. I thought all the violent bits - which let's face it, are the main reason for watching a film like this - were all a bit of a let down.
Then there's the music... OK, so either you like it or you don't. I personally thought it was awful, and really detracted from the film - and the lowest point is the truly dreadful song that plays over the sequence where they start taking bagloads of cash to the bank... not only is it possibly the worst song ever made, but it actually plays over shots of Scarface talking, in a way that makes it look like a deleted scene from Miami Vice. Whether or not this was an integral part of the film's style didn't matter to me - it just looked and sounded terrible.
Finally, Scarface - both the man and the film - were ultimately too simple to be truly satisfying. As a character, he might have balls, as he's constantly reminding us, and his brashness is responsible for the good bits in the film, but overall, it's somehow a bit of a letdown after the manipulative cunning of a Michael Corleone. And as you watch the film, it's so utterly predictable what's going to happen. As soon as you seen Elvira for the first time, it's obvious that Tony will have to get rid of Frank at some point. When Manny mentions how nice Tony's sister is, it's obvious that his feelings for her will lead to his demise. And when Sosa tells Tony never to f*** him over, it's obvious that he will and that that's how the film will end.
Having said all that, it's definitely worth watching, and has some great scenes in it; my personal favourite is when Sosa calls Tony a f***ing monkey over the phone, and Tony starts hurling obscenities back at him only to be told that he's hung up. And at the end when he shouts "You think you can stop me with bullets?" is somehow a hilarious but also very moving summation of his whole character.