My favorite crime film

Rating: 10/10 (17 September 2011)

They improved on greatness for this remake of Howard Hawks' 1932 film of the same name. To my mind, this is more than a crime doesn't pay morality tale, just as Al Pacino's Tony Montana is an anti-villain rather than an anti-hero. This is deep filmmaking not to be dismissed in so superficial and parochial a manner.
Plot spoilers hereunder:
Tony Montana suffered under the boot of Castro in communist Cuba until joining the exodus to America thanks to President Carter's gracious, yet naive open-arms policy. When his friend Manny (Bauer) asks what's coming to him, he says: "The world, chico, and everything in it." Ambitious to the hilt, he refuses to eke out an honest existence amidst such wealth and opportunity. Meaning well, he endeavors to relieve his sister (Gina, Mastrantonio) and mother (Colon) of such meagerness to their corruption and indignation, respectively. Hotheaded and highly prone to excess, he wants to take care of mama and sis on the side, while braving his way to the top of Miami's cocaine empire.
Other characters include Omar Suarez (Abraham), a lowlife thorn in Tony's side that is not long for the film; Frank (Loggia), a contentedly low-key operator seen as "soft" by Tony; Mel Bernstein (Yulin), a rat bastard cop who Frank pins on Tony after their falling out; Elvira (Pfeiffer), Frank's girlfriend turned wife of Tony; and Sosa (Shenar), a Bolivian kingpin who starts up serious business with Tony after making it clear that betrayal is not something he finds humorous. Apart from Pacino's of course, I would single out Paul Shenar's performance. Exceptional work all around, but replace Shenar and we have a problem.
Tony ends up facing a few years for tax evasion, which gives Sosa leverage over him. To avoid prison on account of Sosa's government connections, he has to help take out a respectable Bolivian journalist. Not a walk in the park, but better than prison, he figures. By this time, Elvira, notwithstanding her own problems, summoned the strength to leave their toxic relationship and look for greener pastures.
Paranoid and addled by a cocaine addiction, Tony remains principled, and opts to shoot dead the black-hearted sack of human garbage (Alberto, played very well by Mark Margolis) holding the detonator instead of going ahead with an assassination unexpectedly involving a wife and kids. The journalist makes a damning speech to the United Nations, and Sosa is livid with rage at the betrayal.
Tony, not at all in a serene frame of mind, finds Manny living with Gina, and gut-shoots him to death like a mongrel, recalling to mind the wonderfully powerful counterpart scene in Hawks' original. Having warned womanizing Manny against such conduct, Tony was outraged by a sense of betrayal, and did not realize that their relationship (marriage) was not necessarily indecent after all. Consequently, Gina lost her mind before being machine-gunned down by one of Sosa's guys as scores of them commenced their assault. Fuelled by coke and rage, Tony returned fire with a characteristic gusto appropriate under the circumstances. He dies a bullet-riddled dramatic death in front of "The World is Yours" statue.
Torn between a principled, yet conditional respect for life and avaricious criminality, Tony tried to compartmentalize life in a manageable way without success, least of all as it pertained to Sosa, who is not so hung up on moral quandaries. Gina and his mother would have been better off had he remained a dishwasher, but I doubt very much that he would think so of himself.
We have Sidney Lumet to credit for the Cuban angle including the Mariel Boatlift. Oliver Stone obviously has a thing or two figured out to have written this masterpiece. Brian De Palma directs brilliantly. We see his Hitchcockian influence in the New York City car scene. I absolutely love synth master Giorgio Moroder's very '80s original score. All the music hits the mark. John A. Alonzo's cinematography and Bruce Weintraub's set decoration are tops. Spanish is used less than would be realistic, but this artistic license works cinematically. There is Spanish in the film, so it is not as though it went out the window.
It's in my top 10.