Scarface was
quite the controversial picture when it was first released, with many reviewers
calling it excessively violent and claiming that it had more profanity than a
Scottish soccer pitch. I did not feel this way while watching it. Have I become
emotionally numb to simulated movie brutality, or has media just gotten more
extreme over the years? Scarface has some brutal moments, of course, but
I didn’t find them overindulgent… instead I found them quite appropriate to the
story of depravity and excess that was being told. As for the swearing? Well,
if you have ever walked around a middle school you have probably heard worse.
Al Pacino is considered one of the best
actors of the twenty-first century, and his performance as Tony Montana might
as well be exhibit A. Unlike Walter White, Tony doesn’t break bad so much as
break worse, his only character development being a slight pivot from being a murderous
psychopathic underlying to being a murderous psychopathic drug kingpin with a
cocaine addiction. But Scarface proves that you don’t need likeable
characters to follow if your actors and story are up to snuff (get it? Because
of cocaine?) It may be two and a half hours long but it still kept my interest
up until the credits.
Scarface doesn’t really have much to say other than
“greed is bad,” and this is a horse that gets beaten long after it is dead and
stuffed into the bed of a character in another Al Pacino gangster movie. But I
enjoyed it for what it was, and at the very least I’m glad I finally know the
context of the “little friend” line.
