A Classic Gangster Film

Rating: 10/10 (19 August 2013)

Scarface is a crime film that features that tells the story of a Cuban refugee who comes to Miami who becomes a drug cartel kingpin during the cocaine boom of the said decade.Al Pacino stars as Tony Montana together with Steven Bauer,Michelle Pfeiffer,Robert Loggia and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Oliver Stone wrote the screenplay and Brian De Palma directed the movie which was an update of the 1932 classic of the same title that was written by Ben Hecht and directed by Howard Hawks.
Tony Camonte, the Italian-American Chicago gangster in the 1932 classic, is now called Tony Montana.He is a small-time Cuban punk, one of supposedly hundreds among the 125,000 or so legitimate refugees that the Castro Government allowed to immigrate to Florida in the spring of 1980. Quick- witted, hollow-eyed Tony Montana hasn't one redeeming feature, but his greed and ambition are so all-consuming that they are heroic in size if not in quality.He has absolutely no compunction about murdering for profit, which quickly endears him to a Batista Cuban refugee who is the chief of the Bolivia-to-Florida cocaine traffic,later works his way up and succeeds his former mentor.He,too marries the now-dead man's mistress, Elvira.
This is one of the best gangster films ever made.It's cool, it's violent, it's scary and it's unforgettable.It's a whole new spin on the immigrant story and the American Dream as an underworld nightmare as it tells the rise and fall of an immigrant who has chosen to engage in criminal activities. The façade of family loyalty, underworld authority and the mob code is trampled in the feral battle to get to the top of the cocaine mountain as the Tony Montana character robs and murders his way to riches and power, and then numbs himself into a fantasy of invulnerability with his own product.
The performances in this film was excellent in this film.Al Pacino does not make Montana into a sympathetic character, but he does make him into somebody we can identify with, in a horrified way.Also,it has a wonderful gallery of excellent supporting cast: Steven Bauer as a sidekick, Michelle Pfeiffer as a woman whose need for drugs leads her from one wrong lover to another, Robert Loggia as a mob boss who isn't quite vicious enough, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, as Pacino's kid sister who wants the right to self-destruct in the manner of her own choosing.
And most of all,it is a movie that understands crime personality for it portrays laziness and ruthlessness, grandiosity and low self-esteem, pipe dreams and a chronic inability to be happy inspite of being abundantly wealthy.