Headscratchers / Scarface (1983)

• Sosa called Tony to drive a car bomb expert around New York to take out the man putting the dealers' collective balls to the fire. Coupla different problems with that:
  1. A car bomb only works if you're trying to send a message, which is why its favoured by guerrillas. If you're trying to take out one guy to shut him up, a sniper rifle's a far better choice. Alternatively, they could have paid someone to shoot the guy, while they were watching him walk from his car to his hotel.
  2. Tony's a highly skilled drug dealer who has a problem harming innocent civilians. Why would you get him to do it, and not just pay some random guy $2000 to do it? And for that matter, why not just find an English speaker who knew his way around an explosive charge and a remote control? The job didn't exactly require a great deal of specialisation.
  3. Tony's explosively violent and as high as a kite 24/7. Why on earth would Sosa give him such a delicate job?
  • The cartel is trying to send a message. If they just shot him, what was to say there wouldn't be a dozen more guys just like him trying to take them down the very next day? You can't hire "some random guy" to do a hit. It had to be someone within the organization. Otherwise then you would have to end up killing him as well, to make sure he didn't talk. Tony was selected for the job because Sosa wanted to know that Tony could be controlled, and would fall into order.
    • Assuming Tony can do that, which he doesn't, and everyone gets fucked over. Sosa less than others, though. Still, there's really no reason Tony specifically has to do it, and the deal is overwhelmingly in Tony's favor if he does. If anyone else who speaks English and is in Sosa's organization does it, the job gets done. All Sosa gained from asking Tony was keeping a trading partner out of jail for 3 years, and even then, he has to call in favors to do so.
    • Sosa seems to really like Tony, though. He probably had no idea how far Tony had descended into drug addled insanity, either, since they live in separate countries and Tony's organization seems to continue to function just fine. Sosa isn't the type to do things for people for free, though, so he naturally needs a favor in return. He probably saw it as a two-birds-one-stone kind of deal: help his friend without doing charity work and kill this asshole activist. No wonder he sent an army to kill Tony; he was furious at being betrayed by someone he genuinely considered a friend.
• Why did they not blow up the car the second the victim gets in? Why wait? This smells like a Plot Device to give the family time to get in with him, and let Tony make a decision that will lead to his downfall.
  • It was specifically stated that the car was to blow up in front of the UN building. This was part of the message implied from the above topic, so it would discourage witnesses ranging from future reporters to politicians that do have the power to put a stop to Sosa and other dealers the reporter was whistle blowing.
• How the hell did Sosa get that many gunmen to Tony's mansion at the end without anyone noticing? There must have been almost a hundred of them, and they presumably came in less than two days after the botched bombing. How did Sosa get that many men from Bolivia and Miami with their guns and with no one noticing something? How did they even expect to get away before the police came a knockin' with the kind of noise they were making?
  • A private plane, perhaps? Convoy? Ship? There are plenty of possibilities. As for the last question, Tony lives in a heavily guarded private compound in a fairly remote area. It's entirely possible that if there are any cops around at all they've either been bought off or have learned to adopt a "Just leave things alone unless they spill out of the compound into the larger area" mindset.
  • Tony and most of his crew were away looking for Gina. They were already over the fence when Tony brought her home. So taking out the guards was a piece of cake.
  • Alot of those guys could have been Miami locals. All Sosa had to do was send in a few of his good men from Colombia like the guy with shades on. Then they in turn could round up the best of the rest from around town. There were a bunch of cut throat immigrant criminals in Miami at that time who would have JUMPED at the chance to be on a hit squad for a few bucks.
• One of the things that bothers me about the movie (and it has been a long time since I've seen the movie, so it might have been explained), but why did Tony even start getting high on his own supply in the first place? I know it may have been boredom, but he has people trying to kill him all the time so they can get his empire, and all sorts of activities that could land him in jail or get him killed at any moment, can't be that boring in that case. Also, secondly, why does Elvira also get addicted to coke? She was the one who told him the second rule: Don't get high on your own supply.
  • Probably way people do in real life: Starting out with the ocassional line and then gradually getting habituated to the drug until it reaches full-blown addiction. Also, I might not be remembering this right, but does Tony even use any cocaine until the finale? I just remember him drinking a lot and being obnoxious to everyone. The mountains of cocaine in his office clearly weren't for personal use, he just decided to stick his face in them when his life had gone to shit. I'm guessing that Elvira was always addicted to cocaine, even before she met Tony, it probably just got worse once Tony married her.
  • You are certainly not remembering right. The first time Tony is seen using cocaine was with Elvira in the parking lot at the car dealer. He asks her if he can have some of hers and after getting some, forces a kiss on her. Tony was snorting with both nostrils when he was talking to the banker guy in his office. Tony was using plenty before the finale. Tony would not need to have cocaine in his office unless it was for personal use; he's a big enough drug lord he doesn't have to come into contact with the stuff unless he's using it.
  • He was high as a kite during the restaraunt scene. And also if I remember correctly he also was snorting during the hot tub scene.
• What threat did the car bombing target pose to the cartels, exactly? Apparently the guy was pretty well-known and had gone on TV to talk about how bad drugs are and how much money the dealers make. Well, everybody knows that already. Did the cartel leaders think that if this guy got to talk to the UN that suddenly the whole world would end the drug trade? And if they just wanted to "send a message", then what message was it? That drug cartels are violent criminals? Everybody already knows that too.
  • He was going to do an expose on all those involved in the Colombian drug trade, including members of the government. Granted he had already been on TV making a lot of noise but such a loud, flashy assassination would scare other whistle blowers into silence. Covertly you only scare off those involved. This, as off the comparison may be is similar to terrorism, basically this was a terrorist attack to force the obvious financial gain in profiting from drugs but also the ideological goal of not to reveal sensitive information on the drug trade.
    • 'Counterproductive' wouldn't begin to describe blowing up a well-known whistleblower's vehicle in front of the UN (where countless diplomats, heads of state, and other influential persons come and go from daily). The international outrage would be unparalleled, and it might very well end up with an international coalition forcibly sorting things out for the Bolivian government if the Bolivians were to refuse. Now, an unfortunate 'mugging gone wrong' on the streets of New York, leading to his death? That might be different, but Sosa's plan was going to bring so much additional heat on his operations that he'd likely burst into flames.
    • This may well be an unfortunate case of Reality Is Unrealistic. Remember that the 1976 assassination of the former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American aide Ronni Moffitt (on which the attempted Bolivian journalist assassination in this film was modeled) took place on Embassy Row in Washington DC, and yet Augusto Pinochet was never hounded out of power or even made a pariah for this action (or others) by the international community (to say nothing of Pinochet's probable high-level co-conspirators involved in Operation Condor), but only left leadership in Chile through domestic processes on his own terms around fourteen years later (and the international arrest warrant he was finally served eight years after leaving the presidency was still publicly contested by the likes of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher).
    • The difference there is that Pinochet was an American puppet with CIA handlers rather than... part of the drug cartels that the US was also allied with... with CIA handlers. BEHIND YOU! [smoke bomb]
• Why didn't Sosa's hitmen just let Gina shoot Tony for them? She was clearly trying to kill him, which is exactly what they came to do. So why not just let her do the job (who would Tony be less likely to shoot back at—a bunch of hired thugs, or his own sister?), and then fill her up with bullets?
  • They had no idea what was going on. The one gunman who climbed through Tony's window only saw a girl holding a gun and for all he knew was on Tony's side. So he just opened fire.
  • On closer inspection, it seemed the gunman did try waiting for Gina to kill Tony, but the last bullet Gina fired hit him while he was spying on her, and he shot her in retaliation.
• So many things could have gone wrong when Tony was flirting with Frank's girlfriend Elvira. Why risk it? There are other fish in the sea. She was clearly annoyed by Tony, I'm surprised she didn't complain to Frank about him. If any mobster in real life do what he did, he would be 6 feet under. Trying to sleep with a mob boss's woman is like kicking dirt on his shoes.
  • Tony saw Frank as a pushover, and didn't respect or fear him. So Tony really didn't care what Frank thought about him pushing up on his girl. You saw what happened in the nightclub scene where Frank actually did confront Tony about flirting with Elvira:
    Frank: Why don't you find your own girl, leave Elvira alone.
    Tony: You giving me an order Frank? The only thing is this world that gives orders is balls. BALLS!
  • Many people want what they can't have more than anything. And yeah, Lopez, right after their altercation at The Babylon Club, set up that hit on Tony with the "out of towners".
• What did Tony mean when he said Elvira's womb is "polluted"? I'm still confused about that to this day.
  • Tony is saying that Elvira's excessive drug use has made her infertile to the point where they can't conceive a child. Earlier in the film, it's shown Tony eventually wants children, and he's upset he has "married a junkie" who can't have any.
    • That also explains her anger towards him in rest of the scene: He publicly humiliated her for snorting the same cocaine he was snorting and selling.

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