Overrated Movies: Scarface
“I have no idea what a movie is” -Charlemagne
“Scarface” is one of those films that I can’t help but use to gauge someone’s taste in movies, as well as in some extreme cases, their overall competency. It’s not that “Scarface” didn’t have some decent moments, but with the way the film is often praised, it’s as if it invented the gangster genre entirely.
For those who have not seen Scarface and care not about spoilers, it’s a glamorous look into the life of drug lord Tony Montana (placed by Pacino) and how he rose from a penniless coked-up immigrant with a fake accent, to an absurdly wealthy American with a fake accent. The film begins with an extremely violent exchange, followed by some character building, followed by more bloodletting, followed by some international drug syndicate career advancement. Michelle Pfieffer appears here and there in the film as Tony Montana’s coked-out wife, and Steven Bauer plays the right-hand man, but supporting acting is rather inconsequential in the aim of the film, which is to give Al Pacino free reign to overact all over the place while his character slowly isolates himself at the top of a drug regime.
And overact he does. “Scarface” is like an “Al Pacino’s Greatest Hits” collection that cobbles together the riveting moments from his other films, almost all of which involve the scene or two in his movies when he starts to yell every line at the top of his lungs. Well, since this is a bio-pic, and because director Brian de Palma is just as overrated as his film is, Pacino is shouting at the top of his lungs for practically three straight hours.
So if every scene didn’t offer enough glitz to divert the audience’s attention from Pacino’s mug, there might have been disastrous results. Fortunately, Miami was the quintessential setting for a crime story in the 1980s. It offered warm beaches, scandalously dressed women, executives blowing uncut cocaine in middle of their business lunches, along with a large demographic of foreigners, all of whom were apparently readily able to sell you more cocaine. But as more executive producers began to incorporate Miami into their rotation of “cities that are acceptable to set a story”, the tread began to wear on the tires of the South Florida shore, and Miami became less of an exotic setting, which forced storytellers to start earning their paychecks again.
Fortunately for “Scarface”, pastel colors and cheesy synthesizers were still cool at the time of filming, so tossing them into every scene like a sprinkle of nose candy in your morning coffee, assuming there was an intermission from the night before, gave each scene a sense of progression to go with Tony Montana’s ascent to the top. The more pastel colors, and the louder the cheesy synthesizers got, the more successful Tony becomes. Eventually, the scenes got a little too overwashed with pastel to see clearly, and the synthesizers got a little too loud for Montana’s rivals to take, so it was time to send in an army of guys to kill ol’ Scarface.
With his mansion under attack, Montana fires back recklessly with his 12-round rocket-launching member, followed by the deposed kingpin diving head-first down a ski slope of powdery gusto into about 20 thousand semi-automatic bullets. It doesn’t matter at this point if the bullets are tearing through an empty chest cavity, his twitching heart having rocketed from his chest back in Act 2, because cocaine makes you rich and invincible. Scarface survived that attack, and lived a long and fruitful life, until he was blasted through the back by some dude who the movie implied was more tactical than the extras hired to overact their gunshot deaths. I suppose that’s the major lesson of Scarface: you can rise from nothing, build a multi-million dollar empire, snort a pound of blow every hour, bang Michelle Pfieffer, kill your best friend, and survive a swarm of bullets. Just don’t get shot in the back. Because your back isn’t invincible like your front.
Ranking a movie is a bit like milk. It’s fine when it’s at the right temperature, but when you let it sit on the mantle in your home, it will begin to sour. Scarface has gone sour because it’s been quoted, branded, remade, and wallpapering every college male’s bedroom. Tony Montana sitting confidently in a hot tub, smoking a cigar, may be a memorable image, but one decent scene in a movie paired up against the several billion mediocre scenes in the movie, give or take a few for approximation.
