Carlito's Way(1993)

I was late to the game with this one also. Sean Penn stole the show completely. Even though Pacino was good, it is Penn's performance that makes this movie worth watching.

It's a very good movie. I love the chase sequence towards the end of the film; very exciting stuff.

Oddly, I just watched this film a few weeks ago for the first time. I also recently saw The Insider, which I think is an even better Pacino movie.

Penn's performance in this one as well as in many others is overrated. Pacino really made that movie, and De Palma's direction almost has never been better.

I also agree about The Insider. Pacino really deserved an Oscar nom for that one.

Love this film
Good performances from Mortensen and Guzman, too.

I'll be honest, Im really not DePalma fan, in fact he shits me, always has...

..but besides The Untouchables, this is the only other film of his that I am a shameless fan of - and honestly Penn goes a long way to explaining why that is.

Jesus, first time I was watching this in the cinema it took me fifteen minutes to realise it was him for chrissake.

Scarface and all the people who slavishly love it can suck my balls, Billy Blanka from the Bronx and the rest of the characters in this film shit all over it.

A really really great movie.

Love it.

And the incomparable Porcel! El gordo Sasso!

Anyone see the prequel, Rise to Power? There's some cinematic gold for ya...

This was actually the second DVD I ever purchased. I bought it blind because I had heard people talking about Al Pacino and in my adult movie watching life, I had not seen an Al Pacino movie. This was like my freshman year in high school. Needless to say, I love this movie.

Yeah, way better and more watchable than Scarface, in my book. Pacino's great, Penn's great, Viggo Mortensen is really great. Penelope Ann Miller is.... topless in a couple of scenes.

This is one of my favorite films. Anytime I catch it on TV I have to stop and watch it, and if I'm not sure what I feel like watching I can grab the DVD off the shelf. It's light years beyond Scarface (though I like Scarface as well), and the quotes are much better.

"His names Sasso. Used to be Ron."
"It's me, Benny! Benny Blanco from the Bronx!"

And the two best Viggo lines ever -

"Diapers Carlito! Fucking diapers!" and "I can't huuump."

Layer Cake completely jacked it's ending from this movie. And Sean Penn owned the white man's afro in his role as Kleinfeld.

Underrated. And I'm not a DePalma loyalist. I appreciated the way he front-loaded it with a tense shootout in the first act to mask how quiet a good deal of the film is. The set pieces are all pretty great. Love the whole cast, and Penelope Ann...well, she was the Malin Ackerman of her day. Not doing any heavy lifting, but hey, nudity.

I still love Scarface, but this is an amazing movie(one of DePalma's best). It's aged really well, and Penn deserved all the accolades he got.

I really love the hell out of that shot of Penn walking to Ryker's.

To me, DePalma's magic on fire for CARLITO'S WAY....when Penn and Pacino weren't kicking total ass....was the very tense action run from the Mob.

If SCARFACE was a young man's take on the crime genre: Getting all the style, the fame, the money, the mansions, the cars, the women....

CARLITO'S WAY is the mature take on the material, where after getting nailed and serving hard time in jail, and only getting out because of a legal fuck-up....he has no hunger for crime glory anymore.

I mean, going from the Heroin Drug Kingpin of Spanish Harlem, a name on the streets...to wanting to get enough cash to slip out to the Bahamas and run a damn car dealership...

If Tony Montana wanted it all now now now, Carlito Brigante realized too late that it aint worth it.

Yet what does the hero in though was that in spite of trying to escape the streets, the streets within him would never escape.

To put it another way, he could have gotten revenge at Penn by taking the plea deal, but nope....he had to screw him personally.

A street crime melodrama in the truest sense, but like Cimino's YEAR OF THE DRAGON and Abel Ferrera's KING OF NEW YORK.....when WAY works, it just works.

CARLITO'S WAY (1993) - **** out of 5

Yeah, it's a great film. Like others said, it does provide a more mature take on gangster life than Scarface.

I'll also add that Luis Guzman is great as well.

LAYER CAKE is practically a movie trying to be CARLITO'S WAY, and yet I think CAKE does WAY better than WAY did.

And I quite dig the hell out of WAY.

Both damn good movies.

I haven't, but I heard Luis Guzman is also in it and plays a different character.

Love the movie, but I always hated the fact that the beginning of the film showed the ending. A great deal of the tension was lost in many of the action sequences because of that...you know that he survives until THAT moment.

For my money, this is Sean Penn's best performance.

Guzman plays another character. Rise to Power is based on the book "Carlito's Way", and Carlito's Way is based on the book "After Hours".

RISE TO POWER is awful. Mario Van Peebles was pretty good in it though.

Carlito's Way is a damn good flick. Mortensen has some choice dialogue, "I can't walk, I can't hump." The accent is what does it. Of course Penn is friggin' spectacular, and it was cool seeing Adrian Pasdar in the flick as the Italian mobster's son.

Yea he plays a hitman or some shit, and it just doesn't work...at all. I agree with whoever said Van Peebles was decent also. I wasn't sure whether to cringe or laugh every time puff daddy tried to sound like a hardass.

Guzman's name is Nacho Reyes in the prequel.

I don't mind the prequel, except in the fact that the flick seems to take place in the late 60's, and since Carlito is only starting out, it should really have been in the 50's. Also, the really happy ending where he doesn't end up in jail.

"Play pussy. Get fucked." -Benny Blanco from the Bronx

Not as good as I remembered. And I've been on the bandwagon since '93.

If you strip away the great performances, you're left with a pretty shallow film. Even DePalma's direction struck me as rather uneven. Some great scenes that add up to less than the sum of their parts. (was there actually praise for Koepp's script in this thread?)

Love what Pacino did with the role. He is great. But Penn is overrated here. He's just riffing on his better performance in The Falcon & The Snowman. And how awful is Penelope Anne Miller?!!! (She's like a shitty Laura Dern) The romance storyline was, to be kind, awkward

John Leguizamo was a revelation in his small role. Cool part, and he nails it. (He became one of my favorites. Never be able to hate despite some embarrassing choices along the way)

The climax is handled well by DePalma. Thrilling chase. Still nothing quite lives up to the poolhall scene/ shoot-out early on.

Give me Scarface.

Miller's pact with the devil was on fumes by the time she made The Relic.

Or The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag, either way, her Hollywood heyday was short lived.

Disagree about Penn. Sure, it's a variation on the weasel, but his work here is pretty character specific, and probably my favorite performance in the film.

Don't forget The Shadow. I have to admit Miller looked great in that one.

(Looking above to notice he already had made his point about Layer Cake)

Sorry there.

I think we're talking about her acting prowess, not whether we'd fuck her.

Point taken. Her acting does leave something to be desired.

Has anyone read the Carlito's Way source novel? A lot of Barrio slang in it but on the whole it follows the movie fairly faithfully.

I only saw it for the first time recently. I've little criticism to level at it, perhaps it's more impactful on the intial viewing.

The amount of tension in some of the scenes is simply incredible, the performances were fantastic. Perhaps these factors simply overshadowed the rest of the film.

Can you believe Miller was actually nominated for her work in this? Unbelievable!

I like Penn's performance. Don't get me wrong. Deliciously sleazy. Don't agree it's up with his best though.

Is all the flash really character specific? Hmm. Perhaps. Rightly or wrongly, I equate his work in CARLITO'S with Cage's in SNAKE EYES. Both great actors having fun; unrestrained and blazing; unapologetically totally over-the-top. (Ironically, one is praised and one is demonized)

Not by me. I love Cage in Snake Eyes.

What I meant by character specific, is that I'm a huge fan of Faclon and the Snowman, and I see these characters as completely different people, yet still in the weasel family. It might be just a case of the New York Jew kind of thing versus the sunnier suburban WASPy sleazebag of Falcon, but I don't see the characters as really having that much in common.

Miller wasn't that bad here. Her character is supposed to be as different from any other aspect of Carlito's life as possible, so her seeming out of place here fits well enough.

James Rebhorn does some real fine work. He has a way of saying "Brigante" that is just magical.

That scene where he kicks the door in, then kicks her back door in is fantastic.

I enjoyed Snake Eyes from a technical standpoint. I'm also a Cage apologist.

If there was one thing to enjoy about Snake Eyes. It was the fact Atlantic City was used. That place is really unused in crime/Thriller movies.

...you could use that sentence to summarize DePalmas career in my opinion.

This is one of 3 DePalma films I can honestly say I really enjoy (not a fan of the guys sorry), the other two being The Untouchables and Casualties of War.

Penn owns this film and then some I reckon.

...and even tho you know from the outset he doesn't make it, evry single time I watch, I sit there trying to will Carlito to just get the fuck on the train.

Dude, you really need to see Blow Out.

I find this movie as some kind of parallel with King of New York (In terms of we see the character after his criminal empire). Although unlike Frank White. Brigante tries to get out and move on but can't.

Mission Impossible's got some great technical stuff going on with the camera, I think the guy's all about putting great people in front of the lens and letting them completely electrify a room with tension.

I can understand why someone might view some of his work as shallow, but the more I watch through his list of work - the more I appreciate what he does.

This could have been DePalma's Chinatown but he fucked it in two ways. One, when making a THRILLER, you don't show the fucking ending at the beginning. That's DePalma pulling his Orson Wells shit, showing the character dying at the beginning of the film, and he misses the point of Citizen Kane completely. It's like showing the end of Chinatown at the beginning. You dissipate any tension because you KNOW he's not gong to make it. Two, that fucking voice over is terrible and gets on my nerves. Get rid of those two things and Carlito's Way would have been a masterpiece.

When you first see it you don't know for sure that he's going to die. Anyway, that's not the point. It's not a thriller, at least not in the conventional sense like SEA OF LOVE or RIGHTEOUS KILL, where you're supposed to connect the dots and work out who the killer is.

You follow his tragic path as he gets sucked back into crime.