Scarface Blu-ray Review

• 29th Aug 2011

Tony Montana arrives in America and is intent, determined and just plain going for the gold when it comes to adapting to and eventually leading the world of organised crime. Quite how he gets there is something to behold as he doesn’t slime and brown nose his way up the ladder. Instead he goes in with his loud personality and just swears and shouts at everyone – even bosses or men who are in his way. He really doesn’t seem to care for manners or for favours. He’s literally almost kicking drug barons out of their mansions having merely knocked on the door and demanded their power.

It’s a great rise and fall story of an extremely flawed man with some very serious issues. But it’s also very relevant for the time it’s set in. You can literally see the world around him fuel his ambitions as he becomes more obsessed with drugs, women and power.

Scarface is remembered now (not back then – but now) as a film that bettered the original version it was taken from; the violence, the swearing, the bombastic performance of Pacino and the entire 80s culture that it’s all steeped in. Be it the political situation of the time, to the drugs culture, to the fashions, the music and the neon lights.  So impactful it is that they even based an entire Grand Theft Auto game around it, and then more recently an actual Scarface game.

The great thing about Blu-ray is that when the picture is worked on properly it really can make anything look beautiful. As mentioned, this film is very 80s looking. And the Blu-ray makes this a wondrous thing. It’s almost like watching a film with fresh eyes, or like meeting an old friend who’s turned out to look even younger than they did the last time you saw them.

The extras are plentiful too. Being Universal they have the old U-Control items which still baffle me to this day and make your menu look quite ugly. But at least the extras are there. There’s the newly produced documentary The Scarface Phenomenon which has some of the key players making comments – except Pa is a bit of a DVD extras slouch.

The rest of the extras include some more in depth featurettes on the writing, casting and making of the film as well as its reception. These are carried over from the DVD special edition, and rightly so. There’s even an amusing look at the TV edit, which if you’re familiar with the film you can imagine might go down.

This one is worth the buy and the upgrade. When a classic looks this good you can’t help but get excited about it all over again. Now you can go discover all those moments again in high definition.

Scarface is out September 5th.

Steven Hurst