The Rocky Horror Gangster Show

Rating: 5/10 (22 February 2005)

I went into Scarface expecting a searing gangster drama to stand up next to classics like Goodfellas, The Godfather, and Carlito's Way. Instead the movie is an over-the-top, operatic melodrama that is only shy a bunch of costumed hecklers to make it into the next Rocky Horror Picture Show. I found the disclaimer at the end -- that not *all* Cuban-Americans were like those depicted in the movie -- to be perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of the whole presentation, as much so as if one alerted the audience after Godzilla that not *all* lizards were bent on the destruction of major Japanese cities. In other words - no kidding!
From a stylistic perspective the movie is badly dated, with the Giorgio Moroder score occupying a particularly glaring spot in the finished film as being an unfortunate product of a not-very-lamented bygone era -- a musical Land of the Lost awash in obsolete synthesizers and peculiarly unfunky rhythms. While we can't entirely blame the film for being made at a nadir of American culture, which 1983 undoubtedly was in some respects, the bottom line is that Miami Vice did a better job of integrating the same cultural artifacts into some fun-to-watch television, and that isn't really saying all that much.
Despite these criticisms, the movie is not unenjoyable to sit through. For me, in its guileless employment of mid-80's cultural flotsam, it became a sort of time machine to that era. At first you are sitting there cringing at what you are seeing, but then you remember: people dug this movie when it was new, and in believing that you are forced to take a trip back to a time when the bell-like sounds of DX7 synthesizers and blow-dried hair were actually *cool*. You remember that movies are made to be watched immediately, and anything we can get out of them 20 years down the road is more of an unintended consequence of conducting anthropology via the art-house cinema.
And there's still a few moments in the film which just plain work: "You wanna job?" "Say hello to my little friend..." and others. In moments like these you sense the seeds of the Sopranos and other gangster movies with a extra large helping of attitude.
In the end, though, Scarface is a campy journey into a dead-end aesthetic of polyester and pop-up headlights. It isn't so much documenting excess as it is an example of excess itself. I wouldn't be surprised in 20 years to go see it as a midnight movie and find a bunch of teenagers hurling toilet paper and insults at the screen in gleeful fits of postmodern revelry.