6 Really Awesome Things About Scarface

If anyone had lost interest in the middle section of the movie, the ending definitely brings them back. In one fantastic sequence we see all at once Tony Montana’s chickens coming home to roost, shown by Sosa’s hoards of henchmen storming the Montana compound through the security monitors Tony has set up all around the house. Of course, at this point he’s coked out of his mind and the security efforts go to waste. It’s another masterfully crafted scene that feels both surprising and inevitable; it’s a bit of a shock to see just the volume of dudes coming after Tony, and then there’s a bunch of other crazy stuff thrown in involving Tony’s sister and everything, but at the same time we know this is how it has to end for Tony.

But then the big surprise is that Tony comes out of his office and just blows the place up. The “say hello to my little friend” bit is awesome mostly because of everything that comes after. It’s a final act of defiance fitting for a guy who has never submitted to authority or fate at any point before. It’s also complicated by the fact that one reason this is happening to Tony is that he actually took a moral stand on something, refusing to include children as collateral damage on a hit. So there’s something righteous about his last stand, which makes it even more awesome. The fact that it’s one guy against dozens of dudes with guns and he’s holding his own makes it more awesome still. And then for the Terminator-looking dude to come and finish the job, it’s all about as perfect an end for a guy like Tony Montana as anyone can imagine.

There’s way too much to love about Scarface to bother thinking about the little things that didn’t seem to work terribly well here and there. It delivers in its big set pieces and most of all serves up just a dynamite character, brought to vivid reality by a disappearing act of a performance by the great, young Al Pacino. It’s also clear the influences this movie has had on art that’s come after, most immediate to me being its fingerprints on Breaking Bad. And is it just me or does Al Pacino go from young, 1970s, understated Al Pacino to older, louder, “hooah” Al Pacino over the course of the movie’s near three hours?

Call me a Scarface believer.