Tony The Blow-Man

Rating: 4/10 (16 January 2005)

"Scarface" is a useful movie to have around. If you walk into someone's house for the first time, and he quotes "Scarface" twice in the first 15 minutes, you know it's time to leave.
After escaping his native Cuba during 1980's Mariel boatlift, former jailbird Tony Montana (Al Pacino) gets a second life in the land of opportunity, which he takes full advantage of as one of Miami's leading cocaine cowboys. Tony wants it all, including his boss's wife, his sister's devotion, and a mountain of blow to call his own, but once he gets it, he starts on a downhill trajectory with fatal consequences.
The fact so many people like "Scarface" is testament to the intensity of Pacino's performance more than the intelligence behind it. In the DVD documentary, Pacino readily admits to the character being two-dimensional. For some, that's great. He's not too complicated that way. But for me, Tony Montana is worth maybe 20 minutes in a movie about someone else. He blows too hot.
Pacino isn't great here. He has some good scenes like at the beginning when he's being questioned by some cops, but mostly he just yells a lot. The supporting performances are uniformly weak, including F. Murray Abraham, who gave one of the great screen performances in the following year's "Amadeus." Michelle Pfeiffer does the best work for 10 minutes, but then the script seems to lose interest in her character and she ends up throwing out some random histrionics before exiting stage left.
The storyline is simplistic and uninvolving. The score is one of the lamest, especially during the opening sequence showing news footage from the Mariel boatlift. The motivations of everyone from Tony's early benefactor Frank Lopez to Hector the Colombian are at best opaque and at worst cry plot convenience. There's a silly bit of business involving Tony's sister and mother which is dragged out too long. And with Pacino's central character so unlikable, this is all too much to deal with.
Is it director Brian De Palma? De Palma makes interesting movies, just not always good ones. He made some very good movies around the early '80s, and "Scarface" would seem like a prime candidate to be another. But it's like when he has a great actor to work with, like Pacino or Sean Penn in "Casualties Of War," he loses the ability to rein them in and just lets them bolt through the fences. At the same time, De Palma often gets great performances from less-heralded actors, like John Travolta in "Blow Out," Craig Wasson in "Body Double," and Michael J. Fox in "Casualties Of War." He's not untalented, just maddening inconsistent.
The film does have passion, and some momentum and excitement that carries into the final crescendo. There's a terrific sequence involving Montana and an assassination target that generates some real concern with the audience because you are actually meant to care a little about the people involved, and Tony for once is not acting according to type.
But mostly "Scarface" is an '80s TV movie with marathon swearing and bloodletting, and a performance from Pacino that hopefully got it out of his system for a while. It's cathartic, maybe, but so's running someone off the road after they cut you off. Not exactly reasonable therapy.