Like being chainsawed

Rating: 3/10 (5 April 2004)

A candidate for the most overrated movie of the 80s? Scarface is regularly described as visceral, involving and, above all, influential, but watching it is like sitting through one of those straight-to-VHS action flicks with people like C. Thomas Howell and Frank Stallone.
OK - the good stuff first. Pacino is watchable, as he always was before he made Scent Of A Woman. Robert Loggia's quietly effective. And the sets are impressively garish.
But there's so much else wrong, and the movie just doesn't convince. Maybe it's because hardly any real Cubans would touch the script, and most of the lead roles went to Italian-Americans (with the exception of, er, F. Murray Abraham). It feels like a Mafia movie (Godfather I & II being the obvious comparisons) done on the cheap.
The music is utterly dreadful, especially those unintentionally hilarious stabs when Tony gets jealous about his sister (a character introduced far too late to make psychological sense). Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is weak, not helped by silly hair and mauve underwear.
Some of the set pieces are incompetently executed - during the riot at the holding camp, during which Tony carries out his first hit, I'm convinced some of the extras are giggling. The disco sequences are like something out of a Jackie Collins movie, or, worse, Basic Instinct. Lots of Caucasians fulfilling stereotypes. Luckily nobody is wearing a Michael Douglas-style v-neck, but it's close.
As for the idea that it was influential, sure. On Miami Vice, and that was naff as well.