De Palma is an artistic thief, and he's guilty of it here as well, but what the hey, nobody's perfect

Rating: 9/10 (31 July 2007)

Not that there's anything wrong with being an artistic thief. Good artists borrow, great one's steal, or something like that.
To be honest, I'm not a big fan of De Palma. Carrie was good, as were The Untouchables and this one, but I can't think of many other films of his that are really good. All copies of the Black Dahlia should be burned as a public service.
But this one works and the funny thing is that it has improved with age.
Someone else in this esteemed forum has suggested that this is original De Palma, not snitching from Hitchcock, or Spielberg or whomever. I disagree.
If Stanley Kubrick had ever made a gangster flick, it would have looked much like this one, I think. The give away is not so much the way it is shot, but the set ups for each shot. The attention to detail, and the combination of colors, images and contrasts in each scene are totally Kubrick. So also are the moments of building suspense.
The entire cast is good, but Pacino is amazing, allowed utterly free reign and running with it. Some of the lines he is required to utter are so over the top, I watch closely to see if he is struggling to keep a straight face, but he pulls it off.
Forget all the stuff about this being a statement about the dark side of the American Dream blah blah blah (which begs the question as to what the bright side of the American Dream is, but I digress). Maybe it is, but the important thing is that this is one big fat fun movie.