It's quite a decent movie. Al Pacino is Carlito Brigante, a Puerto Rican New Yorker. Sean Penn is Kleinfeld, the lawyer who gets him out of the slams after only five years on a thirty-year sentence. Penelope Ann Miller is Gail, the old girl friend Carlito takes up with again after his return to the city.
Pacino used to be a big drug dealer and, having learned some things about life, is now ready to retire, with the intention of taking his cut of some money from the club he partly owns and flying off to the Bahamas or someplace with Miller, there to open a car dealership. He wants out of a city in which everyone now seems more corrupt than before he went upstate, a city in which "honor" has become an almost meaningless word, useful only in coercing help from someone else, merely an instrument.
"You owe me," says Penn. And Pacino, honor bound, must do favor after favor for the weaselly, duplicitous, coke-snorting lawyer including, finally, involvement in the murder of a Mafia member and his son. Penn does the killings. Pacino didn't even know about Penn's plans, but the mob holds him equally responsible.
And while he is running his club and figuring out the details of his escape to the Bahamas, Pacino is forced to enact the role of a man so unyielding and unforgiving that he must brush off brash youngsters who would like nothing more than to take his place in the city's underworld.
It's a complicated world that Pacino inhabits. He needs to juggle too many goals. At the end, he is betrayed by his best friend and brought down, just as he is about to board the train for Florida. I once heard a lecture in anthropology on Hispanic fatalism and thought at the time it was just another cooked-up thematic generalization. But subsequent experience has made me wonder. This film, including Pacino's narrative voice over, could have been written and directed by that anthropologist, . (Or by my fatalistic barber, Luisito, for that matter.) The acting is fine all around, with not a sour note. The direction is equally competent. No show-off directorial adventitions. Everything looks just about right, from Carlito's wardrobe (black leather coat) to the interior of his night club with its neon distractions. Penelope Ann Miller, in a dramatic role, is to die for, or at least to dance with. When this movie was made, Pacino could still run like hell, just as he did in "Serpico." Actually, the direction is fine, aimed at an adult audience. There is a shoot out at the end, almost obligatory by now, but it's preceded by a super-tense game of hide-and-seek in Grand Central Station, with four mob guys darting around and looking for Pacino, who is doing his best to get to Miller and the train. A less mature execution would have involved dozens of guys with Uzis and thousands of bullets and exploding glass windows and naked women taking showers and cars blowing up in fireballs and Niagras of blood and berserk speeding trains and endangered baby carriages and little old lady by-standers and murdered clowns -- and it all would have been carried out in slow motion. The director has done such things before. Not here. The fact that the story can generate so much suspense and excitement with a minimum of gore is a tribute to the people who put this together.
Pacino used to be a big drug dealer and, having learned some things about life, is now ready to retire, with the intention of taking his cut of some money from the club he partly owns and flying off to the Bahamas or someplace with Miller, there to open a car dealership. He wants out of a city in which everyone now seems more corrupt than before he went upstate, a city in which "honor" has become an almost meaningless word, useful only in coercing help from someone else, merely an instrument.
"You owe me," says Penn. And Pacino, honor bound, must do favor after favor for the weaselly, duplicitous, coke-snorting lawyer including, finally, involvement in the murder of a Mafia member and his son. Penn does the killings. Pacino didn't even know about Penn's plans, but the mob holds him equally responsible.
And while he is running his club and figuring out the details of his escape to the Bahamas, Pacino is forced to enact the role of a man so unyielding and unforgiving that he must brush off brash youngsters who would like nothing more than to take his place in the city's underworld.
It's a complicated world that Pacino inhabits. He needs to juggle too many goals. At the end, he is betrayed by his best friend and brought down, just as he is about to board the train for Florida. I once heard a lecture in anthropology on Hispanic fatalism and thought at the time it was just another cooked-up thematic generalization. But subsequent experience has made me wonder. This film, including Pacino's narrative voice over, could have been written and directed by that anthropologist, . (Or by my fatalistic barber, Luisito, for that matter.) The acting is fine all around, with not a sour note. The direction is equally competent. No show-off directorial adventitions. Everything looks just about right, from Carlito's wardrobe (black leather coat) to the interior of his night club with its neon distractions. Penelope Ann Miller, in a dramatic role, is to die for, or at least to dance with. When this movie was made, Pacino could still run like hell, just as he did in "Serpico." Actually, the direction is fine, aimed at an adult audience. There is a shoot out at the end, almost obligatory by now, but it's preceded by a super-tense game of hide-and-seek in Grand Central Station, with four mob guys darting around and looking for Pacino, who is doing his best to get to Miller and the train. A less mature execution would have involved dozens of guys with Uzis and thousands of bullets and exploding glass windows and naked women taking showers and cars blowing up in fireballs and Niagras of blood and berserk speeding trains and endangered baby carriages and little old lady by-standers and murdered clowns -- and it all would have been carried out in slow motion. The director has done such things before. Not here. The fact that the story can generate so much suspense and excitement with a minimum of gore is a tribute to the people who put this together.