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Say hello to my little friend. Literally. His name is withheld, but he was the guy who exposed me to this damn movie when I was about twelve years old.

Back then, saying I’d seen the whole movie would be an exaggeration. In reality, my mate from primary school ended up fast-forwarding the “boring bits” and just kept to the parts where Tony Montana shot people in the head, or got one of his goons to do it for him. Such ignorance of the point of Scarface probably infected the youth of my too-young-to-watch-this-flick-at-the-time generation, and they proceeded to think that Tony Montana, and as Gore Vidal would say, the way he lived, loved, and died, was bloody awesome. My friend was twelve or so years old at the time, half-Spanish and of strong, plentiful balls. He was the perfect, if misguided, audience for this movie. In later years he was a bit like Tony Montana without the power, or the money, or the women. Kinda sad, really.

This movie, as I found out, has been a massive cult hit for fans and practitioners alike of the rap and hip hop community. Whether they’ve massively misinterpreted this movie remains to be seen, but let it be known throughout the internetz that while this film has been misinterpreted by urban and suburban youths alike for two decades now, it’s still a quality, entertaining gangster flick that manages to combine the action packed shootouts of the gangster lifestyle glamourised in movies with the more business (or as my primary school friend used to call it, “boring”) elements of the drug game. This movie is a lengthy sit, which would normally be to a film’s detriment but further adds to the argument that this movie is best watched as a twenty-something adult rather than as an impressionable teenager from the projects, the suburbs, or wherever else.

Rewatching this movie after so many years thinking of it as a blatant cash in on the macho youth aspect of growing up as a man in contemporary first world society – I realise I may have misinterpreted this movie almost as badly as the young men I shared my formative years with. It was never about glorifying the lifestyle of a macho douchebag, or claiming that such an ideology of masculinity was superior to alternative ideas of manhood were inferior. It is a movie about a man who sees himself as the kind of man that the young men of my generation sometimes fantasise about being, but even he does not reach his lofty goal of completely living the dream.

It is the most ironic aspect of Al Pacino’s Tony Montana, he puts up his lifestyle on a pedestal just like youth culture put him on one, but he has feet of clay because he can’t live up to his own bullshit claims about how the politicians and businessmen are “the real bad guys” and that whole, somewhat troubling “first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women” idea of how male-female courtship works. Sure, it works for some people, if all you be fishing for is gold diggers, sucka. Let’s just say that the kind of women who go for guys like Tony Montana aren’t exactly there for his personality – attractive as they may be, their personalities have a bit to be desired. Tony Montana himself is a weasel of a man who’ll claim all he has is his word and his balls, but he’ll screw you over just as easily as the rest of the gangsters in the game.

If there is any moral to this movie, it’s not just an anti-drug movie, it’s a movie that implies the game of gangstas and drug-deals is a game that much like “The Game” where you lose it as soon as you think about The Game in any context, is a game best left to utterly bored and amoral people who will troll the people crazy enough to play it. The drug game is portrayed as a luxurious but empty lifestyle. I’d sure as hell enjoy a lot of the dance clubs depicted in this movie than the horrible discordant noise of contemporary dance clubs, but I’m not exactly a man who’s into drugs that aren’t prescribed by my doctor (and a fine doctor he is, hey, maybe if Tony Montana would have seen him he wouldn’t have been gunned down by Bolivians).

The movie has a very 1980s cinematography, and on a digital video format like DVD, the film stock’s cleaned up a lot, but it’s not like 1970s exploitation cinema which has a specific look which is lost when it comes to restoring it for modern media formats. I imagine the Blu-Ray of this coming out later this year is gonna look awesome, but the important thing is in this review, after having seen the film on DVD, would I buy it? As a suburban white male, I have to say, YES.

Look, there are certain things I don’t like about the glorification of the hip hop lifestyle, but to a certain extent, most blokes in my shoes aren’t exactly going to try and BECOME Tony Montana just because they went to the video store up the road and rented this nigh-three-hour ode to 1980s excess and Hollywood stereotypes I’m pretty sure the Cuban community in America and writers like Junot Diaz have been shaking their fist at ever since this remake of Howard Hawks’s Scarface was released.

It’s not a perfect film, but it’s not perfect in the same sense that a lot of entertaining movies are imperfect. I’ll defend the movie Akira as a masterpiece to my last dying day, but there will always be detractors who say it was too long or too silly to be put in the same criterion as Hayao Miyazaki’s works. For that analogy to make sense, you’d have to compare the grim and gritty Otomo versus the kid friendly Miyazaki, to the idea that Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy, save the third one, is probably going to be held in higher regard to DePalma’s Scarface. But I think Scarface has different goals to The Godfather, and both gangsters inhabit vastly different worlds which are apart from each other.

I’m no expert on gangster cinema, but if the 50 Cent fanboy in your life can stomach a long-ass movie, your main man could do worse than pop this in your DVD player and sit around with his crew to chill and watch some cinematic rendering of what you hope he will never aspire to emulate outside of his post-adolescent fantasy.