While Scarface certainly shows the more glamorous side of being a crime lord, it's also not afraid to depict just how horrifying the criminal underworld can truly be, and remains a very brutal, bloody and often downright disturbing piece of work decades after its release.
For examples from the video game, click here.
Spoilers are off on moments pages. You have been warned.
- By far, the worst moment in the film, and definitely the one not recommended to sensitive stomachs, is the scene early on where Tony's friend, Angel Fernandez, gets killed by Hector by chopping off his arm and his leg with a chainsaw. You don't get to see anything, but that kind of makes it even worse. Tony (who has seen some brutal shit in his life) looked horrified and like he was going to vomit.
- Many of the murders and executions in the film underscore just how utterly ruthless life in a cartel can get.
- Omar meets a gruesome end when Sosa has him hanged from a helicopter. Even Tony, who hated Omar, looked vaguely disturbed by his death.
- Tony shooting Alberto in the face in the car, made even more disturbing by Tony's rage-filled yelling.
- The assassination of Rebenga at the beginning of the film. It starts during a tense revolt, but as the people start screaming "¡LIBERTAD!", and Manny approaches a scared-to-death Rebenga with a knife, you only need to see his eyes to see pure fear. It almost seems like a scene from Hell itself, with chaos surrounding everything and a guy trying to escape from a group of hungry cannibals. The worst part, he wasn’t killed quickly, Tony stabs him in the gut 3 times and he continues to walk through the riot in pure agony until he slumps over and dies.Manny: REBENGA! Libertad. Libertad. Libertad. [stalks Rebenga through the shelter until Tony stabs him]
- The look of pure hatred on Tony's face as he shoots Manny for having a relationship with his sister. What makes it worse, is that this is the last thing Manny saw.
- A more subtle but no less deserving example is the looks on Sosa's partners as they watch the exposé on their activities. This is when you realize that for all their affectations of civility, Sosa and his friends are coldblooded psychopaths willing to murder a man and his family at a moment's notice if it becomes expedient. It is also the fact that Tony can be sent off to murder this journalist with one of Sosa's killers that shows just how small a player Tony Montana ultimately is.
- The entire sequence with the journalist's family getting into the car and Alberto 'The Shadow' still willing to blow the car bomb. The tense music as Tony drives behind the senator's car, with the unfeeling Alberto willing to press the button and the latter ordering the former to keep behind them. The shot with the two girls playing together makes it all the more unsettling and Tony lampshades that Alberto doesn't even have the decency to look at them.
- Gina confronting a coked-up Tony in his office after his killing of Manny is very unsettling, especially when she starts mock-begging him to "fuck me" with utterly murderous rage as she repeatedly shoots at him with a handgun. She even manages to get him in the leg at one point. The music playing during the scene (an eerie and twisted version of her Leitmotif) really doesn't help: nor does her partially undoing her nightgown to reveal her scantily-clad body underneath to her brother just as she comes in. Tony himself is left with a face that's a mixture of horrified and disgusted even before she attacks him.
- The ending. Holy shit. Tony, traumatized by the death of his sister and best friend and coked up, flies into a cocaine-fueled rage, blowing down his locked door (after shouting his famous line "Say hello to my little friend!"). He then proceeds to spray the remaining assaulting men with bullets, all while screaming semi-coherent boasts about how fucking with him is "fucking with the best". He takes bullet after bullet and doesn't die. Then, Sosa's assassin The Skull comes out behind him with a shotgun and blasts him with it. Tony's mutilated corpse falls into the fountain with a bloody splash, and the water can be seen slowly turning red as a statue inscribed with "The World Is Yours" (Tony's mantra) becomes visible nearby. The whole scene is a Moment of Awesome, but Tony's sheer insanity throughout the scene is also terrifying, and you get the real sense of someone who has hit absolute rock bottom.
