helped begin the decline of gangster movies

Rating: 1/10 (26 December 2006)

Before "Godfather", cops and robbers movies were exciting and entertaining. Then came the long boring gangster movies which tried to make us understand gangsters. It doesn't work. "Scarface" suffers from lack of likable characters, lack of believable characters, lack of plot, lack of motivation, lack of a logical sequence of events, lack of fun, just a lack of everything. It is not an exciting movie. You fall asleep before you hear the action wake you up, and then you don't really care. Pacino seems only capable of portraying a pretty boy, even with a scarface, he tries to stay pretty in each scene. Its not totally his fault. The writing is pitiful. Pacino's character comes from a multitude of beautiful Latino women, and we are to believe he lusts after some middle aged looking, raggedy looking, rather pitiful looking, pale lifeless ordinary blonde? Clearly a woman wrote this part of the script. No man could ever buy into it. The plot fails, too. Pacino magically becomes a top master criminal because....well, no one knows why. Nothing is explained. Nothing makes sense. But then, the modern gangsster films are all that way. We don't understand the characters, partly because we have no idea what's going on. Just a bunch of lines, mean looks and blood and gore we actually sleep through.