You Think You’re Big Time? Carlito’s Way, Still Better Than Scarface at 30

“You think you’re big time? You’re gonna die big time!” That line, as hollered by Al Pacino, was all over the trailers and ads for Carlito’s Way back in 1993, selling it as an intense gangster thriller in the tradition of Pacino’s past forays into a life of crime. In that sense, it’s not misleading: Carlito’s Way contains violent stand-offs and white-knuckle suspense, easily standing with Pacino’s best. What the ads understandably elided, however, was that in the film itself, Pacino booms that line out as a bluff, into something of a void. Carlito calls it out from a bathroom where he worries he may be cornered; he’s hoping to evoke his larger-than-life reputation, and then slams open the bathroom door without coming through it, hoping to draw out any remaining enemies so he can tell what he’s up against. Carlito himself is out of bullets, relying on his bravado (and at least a few dead bodies, courtesy of his crack shooting a few minutes earlier) to save his skin. As it turns out, everyone else is already dead, or nearly there, and Carlito Brigante is able to slip away from the shoot-out with a single flesh wound. He’s not gonna die, big time or small time, at least not yet.

This crucial early-film sequence, which builds to its blazing guns with lurking dread and inimitable style courtesy of director Brian De Palma, also inspired the film’s poster image: Pacino – or PACINO, as the poster text tells us – silhouetted against a wall (a bathroom wall in the actual film, made to look more like an alley on the poster), holding his gun. The real scene has Carlito closer to cowering in the shadows than lurking ominously. Yet the poster-ready image isn’t untrue; Carlito Brigante is a pretty slick badass when he wants to be. De Palma’s movie, however, lets us see the man who doesn’t particularly want to be that guy anymore.

Well before it turned 30, Carlito’s Way was already an anniversary picture: A reunion between Pacino, De Palma, producer Martin Bregman and Universal Pictures, almost exactly a decade after they all worked together on Scarface. (The concept of Pacino doing a Latino accent was allowed to tag along too, apparently.) Scarface’s reputation grew in stature since its respectable, unremarkable box office performance in 1983, as it became a gangster classic, an iconic Pacino vehicle and the inspiration for a number of high-profile rappers. Carlito’s Way is also probably better-regarded now than it was at the time of its original release, but though it did inspire a later direct-to-DVD prequel indicating some youth-market interest, it hasn’t reached Scarface heights of imitation, homage or (despite that great silhouette) dorm-room poster ubiquity. But it’s the better film of the two – maybe even De Palma’s best overall. The director himself seems to think so: “I can’t make a better picture than this,” he recalls thinking to himself while rewatching the movie a few months after it debuted to middling business in the U.S. (See the wonderful documentary De Palma for a candid play-by-play of this and all of his other movies.)

At the time, though, Carlito’s Way was oddly received as an awards-season also-ran, on the heels of Pacino’s recent Oscar win for Scent of a Woman, just about six months earlier. That career context provides – whether intentional or not – De Palma’s smaller-than-usual dose of meta-movie playfulness. Early in the film, Pacino’s Carlito gets a new lease on life when an evidence-tampering technicality springs him from a 30-year prison sentence after only five years. He then insists on addressing the courtroom, talking about how he’s been vindicated by the law, with a hamminess not too far removed from his climactic Scent of a Woman grandstanding. As if to point out the artifice of this performance, the visibly irritated judge tells him to cut it out: “You’re not accepting an award,” he says, though the last time much of the audience had seen Pacino, he was doing just that. Carlito is undeterred and continues his speech.

If that’s an in-joke, it’s an outlier. Apart from one other seeming wink at the audience, when another character informs Carlito that he could pass for Italian (some might say more readily than he could pass for Puerto Rican or Cuban!), the movie finds both Pacino and De Palma in a more reflective mood. Carlito really does want to use his second chance to go straight, earn enough money to buy into a car-rental business a friend runs in the Bahamas, and leave 1970s New York City behind. It turns out that his ticket out of prison is also his ticket back into the life he no longer wants: His lawyer Dave Kleinfeld (Sean Penn) gets him a job running a club, but then eventually Dave needs a big favor, and the movie’s final 45 minutes kick into gear with sweaty, inexorably mounting tension.

If the movie often avoids the operatic grandeur of Scarface — no “World Is Yours” blimp, no coke mountain, no opulent bubble bath – Carlito’s Way also feels less constrained by its own story. “Constrained” might seem like an odd descriptor for a movie as sprawling as Scarface, but once Tony Montana scraps his way to a place in the drug trade, the less overt desperation slackens the movie, which turns repetitive before its big memorable finale. (Michelle Pfeiffer’s Elvira, Tony’s wife, memorably complains about both his obsession with money and his default “fuck”-laden mode of expression, as if to anticipate complaints about the movie itself.) In the earlier film, De Palma doesn’t always seem especially fascinated by the ins and outs of criminal activity (certainly not with the hopped-up attention of his pal Martin Scorsese), maybe because there isn’t an explicit voyeur figure whose point of view he can readily identify with.

Carlito, on the other hand, is a quieter, more observant character, narrating his own story with a weariness Pacino would tease out further in future roles. Also: Isn’t a guy attempting to bluff his way out of a tight corner, as in that early shoot-out, actually more compelling than the guy who, waiting for attackers behind a door and hollering threats, actually does have a gigantic-ass loaded machine gun at his disposal? The beginning of that Carlito’s Way sequence, where Carlito notices that something is amiss when his young cousin drags him along on a money drop, generates its suspense from the way De Palma makes his camera an extension of Pacino’s subtle wariness. Similarly, an extended chase sequence late in the film that moves from a subway car to Grand Central Station, delays its carnage until the very end; much of it involves watching Pacino run, hide and think on his feet, in a series of long takes that don’t flinch away from the walls closing in on him.

Elsewhere in the film, there are moments where the star turns up his volume knob, going from Pacino to PACINO, but like that courtroom scene and that big trailer line, they tend to be instances of Carlito performing toward his (legitimate) tough-guy image. When they’re not – when he’s arguing with Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), the ex-girlfriend he looks up post-incarceration, or confronting Penn’s maddening Kleinfeld – the fireworks are chased with a sense of palpable despair. De Palma seems to key into that contrast between an ex-gangster’s street-level reputation and private doubts, and the setpiece scrapes Carlito gets into feel more dangerous as a result. De Palma can still direct the hell out of a juicy stalking scene – Kleinfeld has a miniature doozy after the mob realizes he’s ripped them off and killed a made guy – without relying on the addictive dream logic of his more id-like, movie-drunk thrillers.

If that occasionally leaves Carlito’s Way moving at a leisurely pace compared to the spring-loaded craziness of Body Double or Dressed to Kill, well, it’s still 20-something minutes shorter than Scarface, and a lot more soulful. Typically when De Palma returns to certain motifs, they crackle with knowing wit. (I recall, as I often do, the satisfied laughter of a crowd at New York Film Festival beholding Passion when someone brings up the idea of identical twins, as if to say: Finally!) Carlito’s Way has plenty of familiar bits: The questionable loyalty to an unstable friend who the hero “owes,” a one-last-job-then-I’m-out proposition, the doomed romanticism of the reformed criminal who can’t fully extricate himself from that life. Yet the movie feels genuinely poignant, even – or especially – when it feels like it’s echoing Scarface: The wall-sized images of paradise seen in the earlier film are shrunk down to a little subway ad that captures Carlito’s attention in his final moments. Though Carlito’s Way doesn’t need Scarface to work as a piece of top-notch entertainment, it does feel grander and more accomplished in that better-loved movie’s shadow. De Palma’s masterful flourishes are also, in the end, easing us out of the stylish fugue created by larger-than-life images of gangsters. Tony Montana goes out in a blaze of glory – he dies big time. Carlito Brigante only wants to slip away.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.