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The second life of Brian DePalma's 1983 remake of Scarface has been a curious one. Once portrayed as a man so blinded by ambition that it drove him to lose everything that really mattered to him, dying face down, alone, with no one to mourn him, Tony Montana has since become hip hop's most ironic icon. For a new generation, Scarface is not the tragic victim of his own hubris, but a man who came from nothing, lived a gangster's American Dream, and went out in a blaze of glory.
Enter Vivendi and Radical's new videogame sequel, a story of Montana's struggle to reclaim his shattered empire and exact his revenge on his maker-turned-nemesis Alejandro Sosa. While there's no doubt in my mind that Montana was meant as a tragic character, his recontextualization raises a few interesting questions about how the Cuban gangster might have seen himself. This survivor's tale comes off like a Tony Montana dream sequence; an absurdist fantasy that glamorizes all the vices the movie condemned. The phrase "The World is Yours" is stripped of its tragic irony, and instead becomes the mantra (and subtitle) of this new story. And so Tony Montana is reborn, not as the miserable, isolated man that he was, but the king that he would have liked to be, and perhaps as a new generation of fans would have had him rather.
This leaves us with a story that isn't true to the film or its message, but might still be true to Scarface himself, if his id were allowed to rampage through a relatively lawless Miami more indulgent of his ambitions. Indeed, the denizens of this altered reality all seem to love Tony, and couldn't be happier to see him, or aid his criminal enterprise. Bank tellers cheerfully exclaim "Mr. Montana! Just who I was hoping to see!" as Tony walks in to use their money laundering service, and random passersby will holler amiably to their favorite drug lord. Any business can be bought and used for cocaine trafficking in Scarface's reality, and any criminal infraction can be erased with a check. It might not make sense, but it's exactly what Tony would have wanted.
All of this is woven, appropriately enough, around a shell based heavily on Grand Theft Auto, a theft one might see as fair turnabout in light of the apparent Scarface influence on GTA: Vice City. It seems to be a good conceptual fit for Tony's quest from criminal conquest, and the free-form sandbox structure means players can indulge their darker whims as they see fit.
Much of the gameplay itself is quite solid, at least in the details. The gunplay is, in fact, quite a bit more enjoyable than GTA, and the arcadey driving is intuitive and satisfying. The streets of Miami are loaded with diversions, from underground street races, to gambling, to watching cage matches. There's a ton to see and do, and it's easy to waste time disregarding any greater objective. Tony has an army of lackeys at his disposal, as well. They'll do all the dirty work of fetching his car, stocking his weapons locker, and providing armed backup, making getting around a breeze.
This survivor's tale comes off like a Tony Montana dream sequence; an absurdist fantasy that glamorizes all the vices the movie condemned.
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The problem seems to be that there's not much to ground all of these distractions. The story is somewhere between razor thin and non-existent, with the only goals consisting of buying more businesses, selling more drugs, and spending money on showy excess to build "reputation." There's nothing more to it than that. Block by block Tony conquers Miami by trafficking drugs from suppliers that he scares up deal by deal, before proceeding to exact a revenge on Sosa that could have just as easily been executed in the first hour of the game. Many of the goals simply involve achieving various status levels by whatever means players choose, and those anticipating the touted script by David McKenna will be sorely disappointed by the complete lack of any twists or turns along the way.
This brings me back to my earlier point. This is Scarface's fantasy. Of course there are no twists or turns along the way, and of course everything goes according to plan. I'd like to think that the events of this game might have flashed in front of Tony's eyes during his final moments. His character is even oddly sentimental toward his fallen loved ones whose deaths he caused, asking them to be his angels and watch over him. Even more twisted are the death cries of things like "I'm sorry, Manny," when it becomes apparent that Tony is apologizing not for shooting his best friend, but because he sees his failure to rebuild his empire as failing him somehow.
Whether or not participating in delusions of a fallen drug lord will appeal to you depends on who Tony Montana is to you. If, like the restaurant-goers in that famous scene, you point at him and say "That's the bad guy," then helping him reclaim his throne will be of little appeal. If you see him as hopelessly misguided and lost, I assure you, he won't find his way here. But those who admire Scarface the American Dreamer might relish seeing that blood-soaked dream live on as his desires run amok. I fear Radical knows their audience all too well.
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