Entertaining but not for the reasons intended

Rating: 1/10 (17 February 2006)

This movie represents the beginning of Pacino's slide from important actor to self-parodizing caricature. If his performance was deliberately so awful because it was meant to be a metaphor for the way cocaine can destroy self-awareness and render one a manic self-absorbed fool, it would be justifiable but clearly that is not the intent of his performance (which must be distinguished from the Montana character). There can be no question that Pacino thinks he is giving a great performance.
This is basically a comic book level effort except the acting and story is not as subtle as comic book characterizations.
That said this movie is entertaining and one of the all-time classics of the "unintentionally hilarious" genre. That pretty much the same movie has been made hundreds of times on 3% of the budget and with .0001% of the pretension is besides the point.
If you love bad movies with formulaic and unoriginal stories, sublimely awful dialogue mouthed by actors who equate histrionics with art and are punctuated with plenty of gratuitous blood and gore for shock value then you can hardly do better than this. If you REALLY like them when they are grandiose big budget flicks with writers, directors and actors who have egos the size of Jupiter then this will be one of your favorites ever.