Scarface Review

The reviews in 1983 were hostile, and reading them now the objections are all accurate and all beside the point. It runs close to three hours. It is loud. Oliver Stone's script repeats itself, the profanity functions as rhythm rather than as speech, and the film has no interest in anyone's interior life including its hero's. Tony Montana has one setting, states his philosophy out loud, then does exactly what he said he would do.

What the early notices missed is how deliberate the vulgarity is. De Palma shoots Miami as a neon shopping catalog and lets Tony buy his way into every frame of it, so the tackiness of the mansion and the tiger and the gold is the argument rather than a lapse of taste. John Alonzo's photography stays genuinely gorgeous in the middle of the ugliness, and the chainsaw scene works because it withholds almost everything.

Pacino plays enormous, and whether that reads as a great performance or a great impression is still where critics divide. Michelle Pfeiffer is the counterweight, hollowed out and bored in a way that says more about the money than any of Tony's speeches. The reappraisal since has been real, driven partly by hip hop adopting the film wholesale, and the consensus now sits between classic and guilty pleasure without settling.