The antihero is Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino), a drug dealer from Spanish Harlem. Carlito, just out of jail, is fed up with being the heroin king and decides to go into the rental-car business. While managing a nightclub to finance this move he encounters a new generation of bad guys epitomized by “Benny Blanco from the Bronx” (John Leguizamo). Like an old gunslinger challenged by Billy the Kid wanna-bes, Carlito has to watch his back. He’d rather watch Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), the blond go-go dancer who’s his Anglo dream girl. The guy he should watch is Kleinfeld (Sean Penn), the cokehead lawyer who’s into gang stuff way over his frizzy head.
This would seem to be a film right up De Palma’s scarfaced alley, and in fact it looks and pulsates a lot like his “Scarface.” But “Scarface” came at you like a knockout puncher; “Carlito’s Way” struts and poses like a charade. The movie is adapted by David Koepp (“Jurassic Park”) from two novels about Carlito by Edwin Torres, a native of the New York barrio and a longtime justice of the New York State Supreme Court. The novels have a romantic patina, but behind that there’s a hard reality: you learn a lot about a culture and about the criminal-justice system. De Palma doesn’t really care about that; he’s interested, as he’s so often told us, in the visual and kinetic possibilities: a billiard ball whacking into a skull, a disco jumping with salsa and sex, a guy shot so bad that he bleeds the color right out of the movie.
Tellingly, the film changes Gail from a teacher and social activist to a topless dancer. To little-boy movie moguls, how can a teacher be sexy? The movie Gail is an embarrassment, for the story and for Miller. Kleinfeld is likewise stripped down to a caricature and Penn plays him in a flurry of smirks and snorts. The treasured Pacino himself seems to be doing outtakes from other Pacinos: some leftover Scarface tissue, some hoo-has from “Scent of a Woman.” Newer, down-to-gutter directors like Quentin Tarantino (“Reservoir Dogs”) and Abel Ferrara (“Bad Lieutenant”) make De Palma’s moves seem overblown and out of touch. This major talent has become a style in search of a subject.
