I'm upping this because I just showed my wife the movie.
Honestly, I think Tony Montana is an Anti-Villain at worst and I think he's an objectively better person than Michael Corleone by magnitudes. I mean, yes, he's a cocaine dealer but his ultimate downfall is due to the fact he's unwilling to kill innocents in order to keep his fortune. I think there's a mild case of Values Dissonance at work as well since we're able to look back more and notice that the people snorting Tony's product is also uniformly the rich white people of Miami as well.
As a satire of the American Dream, Tony is really one of the best characters for it because he's providing a product that's made him rich and ultimately his addiction to it destroys him but his "bad guy" speech is also very on the nose.
Is there any particular reason to despise Tony for the actions he took to become rich? Are they objectively that worse?
(Mind you, yes, by the end he's destroyed himself and his family as well as those around him but that's—ironically [or apropos]—due to his drug addiction)
edited 13th Apr '18 9:11:22 PM by CharlesPhipps
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
You know what's a great movie? The 1932 Scarface, which actually has a more evil central character than Tony Montana.
"Meant to be a dick" is still a dick. As much as the movie was centred around humour, I couldn't root for a hero like that. If Sam Raimi wanted to alter the character that much, he probably would've been better served turning Ash into someone funny outside the boundaries of his frustration.
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