Dec. 19: Scarface

There is nothing to admire about Tony Montana, protagonist of the 1983 movie, Scarface. Montana, as played by Al Pacino, is ruthless, impulsive, and driven only by animal desires. Early in the film, he tells his best friend, Manny, that his life's ambition is to acquire the world and everything in it.

His journey starts at an immigration centre, where officers quickly determine that he's a Cuban criminal and send him off to a detention camp. He gets out after a local drug lord agrees to get him a green card if he kills one of his fellow prisoners. From there, he gets a job washing dishes at a roadside food stand but he doesn't last there very long. He gets into the world of drug smuggling and, before long, has become one of the biggest kingpins in the lucrative Miami cocaine trade. Somewhere in there, he acquires a trophy wife, several sports cars, and a palace-like estate complete with a jacuzzi big enough to live in. 

And despite having all of that, he's not happy.

By the midpoint of the movie, we're convinced that Montana is complete slime, that there is nothing redeeming about him at all. So how strange is it that he signs his own death warrant by doing something honourable?

Tony Montana made it clear to his supplier, the Bolivian drug lord, Sosa, that he never breaks his word. So when Montana gets pinched for money laundering, Sosa says he can make the charges disappear if Montana will kill a journalist who's preparing to blow the whistle on him.

The arrangements are made. A bomb has been planted under the journalist's car. All Montana has to do is detonate it. But when he sees the journalist get into the car with his wife and two small children, he calls it off. This enrages Sosa, who sends a crew to Miami to execute Montana, which they do with surprising ease. The final shot shows Montana lying face down in his indoor pool having just been shot in the back by one of Sosa's henchmen. The moral of this ant-drug fable seems to be that a life of crime will send you to hell, but it will also rob you of joy in the here and now. 

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Decades later, someone made a video game based on Scarface, It assumes that Montana survived the attack at the end and his mission now is to hunt down and execute Sosa, which he does over a number of ultra-violent scenarios. I tried watching a playthrough of it and shut it off after only a couple minutes. The movie, Scarface, was a cautionary tale about greed. The video game is just an invitation to commit vicarious violence.