For over twenty years, I hated Scarface. Or at least, I thought I did.
To me, it was always that overblown, coke-drenched macho fantasy that frat bros and wannabe tough guys put on a pedestal. It felt like everything wrong with how people misread cinema—quotable but shallow, iconic but empty. I dismissed it as bombastic, bloated, even stupid. I never understood the love for it.
Until now.
Something clicked—maybe it’s age, maybe it’s distance, maybe it's having seen too much of the American dream’s dark underbelly in real life—but watching De Palma’s Scarface again, I finally get it. I see the movie for what it is: not a glorification of excess, but a grotesque opera about the soul-rotting consequences of ambition without grace.
Al Pacino’s Tony Montana isn’t a hero. He’s a fever dream. A man built from myth, rage, and insecurity. Every growl, every wild gesture, every bullet is absurd—but it has to be. De Palma directs with the eye of a man who knows this story is too big to tell small. It's all neon nightmares and violence as poetry, a gangster flick filtered through Greek tragedy and 80s sleaze.
The world around Tony is paper-thin and gold-plated, and that’s the point. Everything he touches turns to ruin. His rise isn’t exhilarating—it’s exhausting. And his fall? Operatic, bloody, inevitable. Giorgio Moroder’s score pulses beneath it all like a dying heartbeat, synthetic and desperate.
What I mistook for indulgence is, in fact, indictment. Scarface is an American horror story dressed like a power fantasy—and maybe that’s why it was so easy to misread. But now, in 2025, I see the reflection more clearly. We’re still living in Tony’s world. Maybe we never left.
So here I am, a former hater turned believer. It took over two decades, but I finally see Scarface for what it is: a masterpiece of excess, a monument to failure, and a mirror held up to every broken dream that thought it could buy immortality.
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