There's too much expertise, too much sheer love of movie-making up there on the screen for Scarface to be deemed a failure. But the director's failure to follow through makes this a too-long movie that comes up short.

Other than an unflinching, intense and extraordinary performance from Al Pacino as the Cuban-born gangster Tony Montana, this gruesome offering has little to recommend.

Stone sticks all too closely to the dated plot structure of the original movie, and such melodramatic flourishes as Montana's incestuous attraction for his sister now seem completely ludicrous.

With a running time of nearly three hours, the film aspires to the epic status of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather pictures. When the machine-gun smoke clears, though, Scarface is just the biggest mobster mash that Roger Corman never made.