(Originally published by the Daily News on Dec. 9, 1983. This story was written by Kathleen Carroll.)
In 1980, Fidel Castro decided to get rid of his die-hard criminals by simply packing them into fishing boats and shipping them off to Miami along with those Cubans who merely wanted to escape his Communist government. Tony Montana is one of Castro’s rotten apples, a born troublemaker who has much higher hopes than the average Cuban refugee. “I want the world and everything in it,” he informs his favorite sidekick. And he goes after his gaudy, Hollywood-inspired dream of success with a vengeance in “Scarface,” Brian De Palma’s bloody gangland saga.
Montana tries to ingratiate himself with immigration officials by claiming he learned to speak English by watching Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney. But he certainly didn’t pick up his favorite four-letter word from Bogie and Cagney, who managed to play macho without resorting to dialogue that is unfit to print. Still, despite his foul mouth, Montana is definitely cut from the same mold as the gangster hero in Howard Hawks’ “Scarface,” a juiced-up version of Al Capone’s life story, starring Paul Muni. Screenwriter Oliver Stone sticks all too closely to the dated plot structure of the original movie, and such melodramatic flourishes as Montana’s incestuous attraction for his sister now seem completely ludicrous.
Al Pacino, as the glowering Montana, blasts his way to the top of the Miami underworld in record time. He becomes a trusted henchman for a Jewish drug king (Robert Loggia). Once he’s able to flash as much gold jewelry as Mr. T, he sets his gun sight a little higher, eliminating his boss in the usual messy fashion (“Do you want a job?” the wounded Montana asks the drug king’s terrified bodyguard who, understandably, leaps at this new opportunity) and snatching his former employer’s mistress (Michelle Pfeiffer is appropriately wistful as this WASP-ish blonde goddess who is fond of powdering the inside of her nose with cocaine) from her satin-covered bed. Montana begins to rake in the millions after cementing a deal with a Bolivian drug lord (Paul Shenar, who all but wipes Pacino off the screen with his suave good looks and cool authority). He moves into an absurdly ornate Greek Revivalist mansion where he sits in a black and gold French Empire-decorated study, looking like a brooding Napoleon.
The trouble with Montana is that he’s just a one-note character, a ruthless punk whose violent end is predictable long before he breaks the cardinal rule of drug kings by getting high on his own supply. His action should be horrifying, but one can only laugh at his excesses as the movie reduces a truly grave problem, the alarming success of Miami’s drug peddlers, to the level of a Mack Sennett comedy. The inevitable ending, in which an army of guerrillas, who obviously can’t shoot straight, take forever to rub out Montana, is an absolute howl. Worse still, De Palma seems to think he’s making an underworld epic on the scale of “The Godfather.” The original “Scarface” ran a brisk 90 minutes, but De Palma drags out the bloodshed for nearly three hours, adding phony church music to give a more serious tone to the movie.
Pacino’s jaw juts out further with each scene as he sputters away in his relatively convincing Cuban accent, but his explosive Montana is no match for the memory of his Michael Corleone, who suffered internally because of his crimes. “I think you speak from the heart,” the Bolivian drug lord tells Montana. But it’s obvious to the audience that Montana doesn’t have a heart, much less the tragic grandeur of Hollywood’s more memorable heavies. He’s just a cartoon monster, an excuse for De Palma to show off his obvious talent for staging shoot-outs.
“Scarface” was originally socked with an X rating by the Motion Picture Association. The movie is certainly violent, but, to be perfectly honest, it is less graphically gruesome than the average gross-out horror movie. What is disturbing is that some people have claimed that it is an anti-drug movie. Montana does become a zombie as the result of all his snorting, but the scene in which he takes a nose dive into a lethal pile of cocaine provokes only derisive laughter, as if his habit were merely just a joke that life played on this relentless bad guy.
