"Nothing exceeds like excess."

Rating: 8/10 (10 December 2000)

WARNING: REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

I hired this video out as I looked forward to the sight of Al Pacino wearing woollen knitwear. However, when I got home I suddenly realised that I'd misread the title Â– I thought it was called Scarfface. But this matters little as we get Al fully immersed in a Cuban character, coming over all intense and fiery.
The film is the ultimate exercise in excess, though works because it starts on such a low-key note. The intensity builds gradually, subtly, until we're left with what is, unless I'm mistaken, a small Christ analogy from De Palma. In many ways the film shouldn't work at all. A screenplay by Oliver Stone and incidental music from Giorgio Moroder? Yet work it does, with Moroder's downbeat, oppressive score perfectly theming the piece. The only slight missteps the film takes are in the final hour, with an eighties MOR tune playing over a sequence of images. Debbie Harry contributes to earlier segments of the movie, though this is part of the background music. Here the music is laid over the top, like Dirty Dancing or a John Hughes movie. And it's also a little incongruous seeing hitmen raid Tony's (Pacino's) house to the strains of drum machine electropop. But other than these leeettle discrepancies the film is on sure ground all the way. In fact, such full-on tactics only serve to mirror the demented nature of the screenplay.
Pacino is on excellent form, spitting, yelling and elevating the "f" word to an art form. Best example is obviously his chat-up line to future wife Michelle Pfeiffer: "you got a look in your eye liked you ain't been f****d in a year." Though a later scene where he refuses to assassinate a man because his wife and children are in the car with him shows a touching layer of morality. And when the film concludes with Pacino, face plastered in cocaine, expressing non-platonic love for his sister and inviting about 50 hitmen to say hello to "my leeetle friend!" you know that, if only he would give us a "hoo-haa!" as well then it would be perfection.