****WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD****
Whoever said they don't make them like they used to obviously never saw Brian de Palma's loving and totally non-ironic homage to the great Warner Brothers bullet ballets of yore. Al Pacino's Carlito - a good bad guy who wants to go straight but isn't allowed to ("Just when I'm trying to get out, they drag me back in!", as he said in Godfather III) - would have been a natural for the young James Cagney, much of whose exhilarating on-screen vitality Pacino shares. De Palma as usual devotes most of his attention and talent to the action set-pieces (especially the joltingly violent pool-room shoot-out and the tour-de-force chase sequence through Grand Central Station), not saving much for the sometimes very lazily handled bits that go in between, but gangster aficionados won't care about that.
Tell you how good a movie this is: when Carlito Brigante got whacked in the final scene, the girl sitting next to me in the cinema gasped "Oh, no!" and nearly started crying. Not the most sophisticated reaction in the world, but a more telling guide to a film's powers of emotional engagement than 100 blase reviews in the New Yorker. If you're too smart to enjoy Carlito's Way, you're too smart.
Whoever said they don't make them like they used to obviously never saw Brian de Palma's loving and totally non-ironic homage to the great Warner Brothers bullet ballets of yore. Al Pacino's Carlito - a good bad guy who wants to go straight but isn't allowed to ("Just when I'm trying to get out, they drag me back in!", as he said in Godfather III) - would have been a natural for the young James Cagney, much of whose exhilarating on-screen vitality Pacino shares. De Palma as usual devotes most of his attention and talent to the action set-pieces (especially the joltingly violent pool-room shoot-out and the tour-de-force chase sequence through Grand Central Station), not saving much for the sometimes very lazily handled bits that go in between, but gangster aficionados won't care about that.
Tell you how good a movie this is: when Carlito Brigante got whacked in the final scene, the girl sitting next to me in the cinema gasped "Oh, no!" and nearly started crying. Not the most sophisticated reaction in the world, but a more telling guide to a film's powers of emotional engagement than 100 blase reviews in the New Yorker. If you're too smart to enjoy Carlito's Way, you're too smart.
