Scared For Life

Rating: 1/10 (4 June 2001)

I can't really understand why Brian DePalma felt the need to do a remake of Howard Hawk's 1932 gangster masterpiece Scarface. The original is so good and tough, lean and stark, short and to the point. This laughable mess goes on for an unbearable three hours, and has as its centerpiece, it's anchor, its star, Al Pacino who is simply dreadful. What has happened to this once exciting actor who gave so many memorable performances in the early seventies. His downfall may have begun with this very film, and he has gone downhill ever since. All his recent roles & performances seem the same, they blend and melt into one. His performances have become lazy, fat and dishonest. At times it seems as if his performances are yelled at us, and this is usually mistaken as intense and powerful acting. When he tries to be subtle and quiet,he comes off as insincere and all method. He was fun in Dick Tracy, because he was playing a cartoon, and his overacting was exactly right for a comic strip. His performance was all make-up. His Oscar for the cheap & sentimental "Scent Of A Woman" was undeserved, but as Oscar saw it he was long overdue. So in Scarface we have Al playing gangster with a bad Cuban accent which comes off as a bad Mexican accent. DePalma & the screenwriter Oliver Stone have change the Italian criminals of the original to Cubans, and instead of booze we have coke, instead of the fine subtle Hawksian direction of the original we have De Palma's over the edge misdirection. To be sure DePalma has made some terrific original films. Carrie, Sisters, Dressed To Kill and The Untouchables immediately come to mind, but Scarface is not one of them. There is however one top notch DePalmian sequence and thats the chainsaw in the motel bathtub scene, but thats only a few minutes in a three hour flick. The violence and gratuitous cursing wears us out, and after awhile it all becomes meaningless and stupid. I envy Michelle Pfeiffer who in the film gets to walk out on this mess. Also in the cast is F. Murray Abraham, one year away from winning a best actor Oscar and oblivion, & Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio who in the flash of a snort goes from being a good sweet girl to a raging party girl,unconvincely I might add. The film also looks ugly and the recently deceased John A Alonzo's cinematography is muddy and common. Not exactly a highpoint of American cinema.