Thank you to everyone who voted for this movie. My favorite Pacino role. Benny Blanco from the Bronx is a great character. Awesome reaction, glad you enjoyed this masterpiece.
It was a battle bruh, it wasn't only me but a lot of my fellow patrons suggesting this film to Dan and Sam for months, and to their credit they did put this film in polls but Carlitos way always lost but not by drastic votes it always came in second 🤦 and this final fourth poll that it was in it finally won! I even commented to them saying "I hope you don't give up on Carlitos Way it's very much worth it!" So at the end of the day I'm happy they experienced this film 🙏
Yes! Brian de Palma is awesome. This is one of his high watermarks. He's made a couple of bummers too during his career, but he's still a genius filmmaker. Can't remember who said this, perhaps it was Pauline Kael, that the mark of a great filmmaker is that even when they fail, they fail in interesting ways (*cough* Bonfire of the Vanities *cough*). I love the old man, he's one of the most talented to ever work in Hollywood. No one, exactly no one, can match him in the technically complex suspenseful cat and mouse chases he likes to create. It is visual ballet. His film photography is stellar virtuosity that make one start giggling with goosebumps galore. Cheers 🍺
If you watch until the end of the credits, you will see Gail embrace a small child that walks up to her, implying she did indeed keep the baby and went down to the Bahamas.
Sean Penn in this film is yet another reminder that supporting actor performances in 1993 were incredibly stacked: Tommy Lee Jones (The Fugitive); Ralph Fiennes & Ben Kingsley (Schindler's List); Val Kilmer (Tombstone); Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, & Dennis Hopper (True Romance); John Malkovich (In the Line of Fire); Leonardo DiCaprio (What's Eating Gilbert Grape); Pete Postlethwaite (In the Name of the Father), etc...
I wish more reactors reacted to this movie because it's amazing, it tends to get overshadowed by "Scarface" and it being the more mainstream pop cultural known. Also, this will always be a criminally underrated movie. Al Pacino and Sean Penn are off the charts.
I used to request this movie so much a couple years ago, when reaction videos started to blow up, and everyone was watching Scarface. I gave up a long time ago, almost forgot! Lol. Stoked to see it now.
It is NOT underrated, it's overlooked. For a film to be underrated it would have to have bad ratings. It doesn't...it's got a critics' score of 84% and an audience score of a whopping 91%. That's an incredibly high rating.
"Here comes the pain!", what Carlito says in the bathroom early in the film when his gun is empty, is a line of dialogue DePalma reuses later in his 1998 film SNAKE EYES.
The two films had the same screenwriter, so that's part of it, but De Palma loves to quote his own older films, sometimes literally, sometimes with reused shots and the like.
Donnie Brasco is another one that probably scores pretty high on polls. Pacino and Depp gives some of their best performances in that one. It's a must watch.
Glen Garry Glenn Ross. Four words. That movie with him in it. GOLD. And I am not forgetting the others IN THAT FILM. Ed Harris, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, Alan Arkin, and Jack Lemmon...
Wow, I think this is the first time seeing people react to this movie. Crazy. Was my favorite movie at one time. BTW, Sean Penn's performance is off the charts.
Same here, I've been waiting a long time for someone to finally react to this film. Yeah, Penn should have gotten a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Personally, it's my favorite supporting performance of 1993 and I know that was a very competitive year in film.
Carlito's Way might actually be DePalma's best film. It's definitely in my top 3 favorite DePalma movies along with Mission Impossible and The Untouchables. Also, honorable mention to Blow Out.
@@Jordashian93 This is how weird my brain is. Pean made me think of ‘Bean.’ I then imagined Mr. Bean, played by Rowan Atkinson, as the lawyer in Carlito’s Way (& chuckled at how ridiculous that is).
That poll at the beginning had some seriously great movies. Dog day afternoon, the French connection, and lock stock and two smoking barrels are masterpieces.
@@Mr.Goodkat I thought it was boring the first time I watched it too, but I saw it again recently and it was way better than I remembered. I don’t have the dvd so I don’t have anything to say about that. Sorry the movie was spoiled for you.
@@tylerkeenan4390 It's over all the posters so you don't have to see the dvd cover to get it spoiled, that being said not sure I even did get it spoiled, I never felt like I did.
That ending...that damn ending. Every f****** time man. This is one of Al's best performances. It's a better film than Scarface and I will die on that hill.
Me too. I used to think that I didn’t like Scarface but now I realise me not liking it means that it did its job. Tony Montana is repulsive. I prefer Carlito’s Way because I think it is shot better, structured in a way that maintains suspense & you root for the main character. Also, the lawyer from GTA Vice City was based on the lawyer from this movie.
Great reaction, guys! You've done De Palma's 3 "gangster" films, as well as Carrie. He's got a whole bunch more suspense thrillers: Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double, Raising Cain, Snake Eyes. Plus a great, but disturbing Vietnam War film Casualties of War.
@@marcus_ohreallyus Body Double and Blow Out are both astonishing, clever, beautiful and engaging films. De Palma is one of the best filmmakers of all time. If you compare him to his close friend Steven Spielberg, de Palma has made more bummers, and less money than him. Spielberg is a more emotional filmmaker, and he never makes bummers. He's technically proficient to the nth degree, but lacks the creative eye that de Palma has. Visually, de Palma has no current equal (Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles also had that flair). Blow Out and Body Double are two examples of this. Cheers 🍺
4:00 - This lady here, she's actress Sandra Santiago, who played Detective Gina Calabrese on the hit 80s cop show, "Miami Vice", alongside Don Johnson, Philip Michael Thomas, Olivia Brown, and Edward James Olmos. She also had a key role in the cult classic breakdancing and Hip-Hop film, "Beat Street" (1984).
Just for the record, this movie was taken from a book with a different name (After Hours), but it was written by a Judge (Edwin Torres) who grew up in Spanish Harlem during this era (70's) and a lot of it is taken from a true story, only the names had been changed so they couldn't be libel for lawsuits. IMO this is Al Pacino's most underrated movie and one of the most underrated gangster films too.
A under-rated GEM. In a twisted way this is a horror movie. Pacino is always perfect, Penn is super-aggravating, and a great supporting cast. It feels like proto-The Sopranos somehow. I would suggest either HEAT or Donnie Brasco for other great Pacino films.
This is my favorite Al Pacino movie! The performances are great, De Palma really knows how to hold the suspense and make you want Carlito to escape in the end! A quick note, this is based on a pair of Novels. While this movie is titled "Carlito's Way", the movie is actually based primarily on the sequel book "After Hours (1979)" as the original novel is titled "Carlito's Way (1975)" and is based on Carlito's rise and fall for what he was in prison for in the beginning of the movie. The Sequel movie "Carlito's Way: Rise to Power" is based on the original novel, but is nowhere near as good as this movie! Some day, I do have to read both the books!
I’ve been waiting for someone to finally react to this masterpiece! Pacino and Penn deliver two of their best film performances. In my top 10 movies of the 90s. Also, this might actually be Brian DePalma’s best film.
@@Corn_Pone_Flicks This feels like a movie that should have been nominated for a ton of Oscars, but a few things worked against it with '93 being an extremely competitive year and also Pacino had just won Best Actor the year before for Scent of a Woman. I remember that both Sean Penn and Penelope Ann Miller actually got Golden Globe nods, for whatever that's worth.
It's interesting that it seems that everything is out of control and the people around him are all out of control, but, actually, what finally got him was something 100% his own fault and own making. Can't really blame all the other factors in the end- in this story, it was the one thing that was totally his own fault that brought him down.
Another great Pacino crime film is #title "Donnie Brasco" (1997). Brilliant performance by Pacino. And it is an all-star studded cast: Johnny Depp, Michael Madsen, Anne Heche, James Russo, Bruno Kirby, and Terry Serpico.
A great film. I think De Palma did his best to try to get people to forget that Carlito gets shot and was hoping people would forget it until the final reveal or at least until the shot of Benny running alongside Carlito to the train door. It is a testament to the film's quality that even if you remember throughout the film what will happen to Carlito at some point, as the Schmitts did, the film still works. I also think Benny running alongside Carlito to the train door was a master stroke; you can't outrun your mistakes, your past or your fate.
Still such a poor decision of how to open this film. What was he thinking? I have probably shown a Baker's dozen people this film and I always start it with carlitos monolog in the courtroom and every viewer has set an afterwards they thanked me for the change and are dumbfounded at the original opening
@@davidking498 I think it was a great decision. The story of Carlito's Way (a gangster wanting to change his ways) is a cliche; one that has been told many times before. If Benny were to pop out of nowhere at the end (without or even with his running alongside left in) it would feel cheap and cliched. De Palma's telling us at the start what will happen helped raise this film above that and made it into something more elemental or myth-like. You and your friends are entitled to your opinions but, obviously, this movie has attained a high status now with that opening.
Sean Penn had previously appeared in Brian De Palma's Vietnam war movie "Casualties of War". He has one of my favorite lines in that one, sort of a revision of a famous quote. Whenever I come across the original quote, I can't help but remember the way Penn said it. I saw "Carlito's Way" twice in the theater...I can't believe it's been 30 years since then already! I love De Palma's widescreen camerawork. I feel like every possible shot you could come up with for widescreen is in this movie. I'm also a big fan of the score by Patrick Doyle. Doyle also did the music for "Donnie Brasco" (Pacino again) and "Rise of the Planet of the Apes".
Gayle was pregnant and had their child, a son without him in Miami..he wouldn't make it but it was a fresh start for her and a new life for a son a part of him he would never know. Which was the sequence we saw of her silhouette dancing with a child. Carlito is one of nicer characters Pacino plays with a honor code similar to Ned Stark from Game of Thrones around villains where a code means nothing. His honor was his Achilles Heel. Carlito is the polar opposite of Scarface.
16:37 - First rule of leaving your old criminal life behind, is leaving the people you rolled with behind. They are like crabs in a barrel who don't care about you wanting to turn your life around, they will keep dragging you back into the dirty barrel, over and over, and over; especially if you let them. You really gotta excommunicate yourself from those folks who use to roll with you when you did dirt; I've seen this happen all too many times to far too many people. You don't owe any of those people anything. All they did was add to your criminality and grief.
Nice reaction - this film makes me wonder how far we insist on flirting w our own mortality - Carlito has this voice in his head that keeps talking him into some form of self-sabotage, and DePalma teases us thruout w this awareness - in classic myth, the hero gets a way out, as long as he doesn't look back, and he always fails that test - my favorite part is Sean Penn - he had a run of great roles: Casualties of War; Carlito's Way; Dead Man Walking; Sweet and Lowdown - all totally different, and he does each so brilliantly you can't imagine anyone else doing it - during that time IMO Penn was the best American actor, tho there was a lot of competition - re DePalma, he plays these Hitchcock mind-games w the audience, toying w our expectations - for me, Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Casualties of War are his vintage films - this strikes me as one of his less personal vehicles, just expert genre films w an eye to the mechanics - but something resonates about how Carlito keeps shooting himself in the foot, over and over
I saw this in theaters when i was 9 with my dad, being Hispanic and living in new York at the time this film was a big deal when it came out,love seeing the story of a man trying to escape the life,great film,alot of great quote's
"Carlito's Way" was Pacino's first movie after winning the Oscar for "Scent of a Woman" and the marketing emphasized Pacino's career as a legend. The trailer opened with a few quotes from his notable movies before revealing Pacino's face. It was definitely his and Brian De Palma's return to "Scarface" territory. Critics and audiences weren't too kind but I was really a fan of the 1975 setting and soundtrack at the time.
Always loved this movie. My best friend from high school, when he was trying to get into acting, was actually an extra on the subway for that subway scene. Looking at your patereon poll list, I saw RONIN in there. You guys HAVE to do Ronin 🙂.
Cool suprise! Great underrated classic, just like Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead (Andy Garcia, Christopher Walken, Christopher Lloyd, Steve Buscemi, they're actually very similar movies). Sean Penn in particular is amazing in this. Looking forward to the video!
'Carlito's Way' might low-key be better than 'Scarface'. After this you two gotta see 'Donnie Brasco' With Johnny Depp and Al Pacino. Al Pacino pretty much plays a Tony Montana who never made it big in the criminal world. That movie is dope.
@Corn_Pone_Flicks I said that because 'Scarface' is such a beloved film. And 'Carlito's Way' doesn't get the recognition it deserves, I didn't achieve the audience 'Scarface' did.
Brian De Palma is the master of the set piece, and the entire last 40 minutes of this is like one big extended set piece, it's just awesome. Do Blow Out (1981)! Brian De Palma directing John Travolta in an investigative paranoid thriller! Sam at least would love it
Hahaha, yes! I LOVED Vice City & him as a character. The soundtrack is unreal. I still listen to some music from that like “Act Like You Know” by Fat Parry’s Band. Absolute banger. In fact, in my city, a local bar had a one-off karaoke night where people would sing songs from the soundtrack but they were supported by an actual band behind them. Rockstar should remake that game for current generation consoles / computers.
I was looking for the Vice City shoutouts! Ken was a such a good character, and so obviously based on Sean Penn's role in this film. I love it when art inspires art. If it works, imitate it!
Great movie that gets overlooked at times for whatever reason, Pacino was awesome here, you're really wanting this guy to get away from the bad s@@t with his woman and the ending is tragic but it's a great message that it's pretty tough to get yourself out of that crime life. Sean Penn is also great here.
One of my favourite films growing up! Haven't seen it in years. Gonna watch it tonight because of this reaction! Thanks for bringing back so many good memories.
I’ve always felt this movie gets overlooked among the great crime films of cinema. DePalma, Pacino, Penn and a slew of great character actors. Love it!
A film with a similar feel to this that has Sean Penn in the starring role is "State of Grace" about the Irish mob, the cast is amazing and Gary Oldman steals the show as an Irish/American young punk thug gangster. With a watch.
When i watched this in 94 i was also blown away by Sean Penn did not know it was him till credits at the end a great movie great acting by Penn , Pacino and Leguizamo as Benny Blanco loved this movie great reaction to a great movie.
The vast amount of movies for adult audiences from Hollywood during the 90s was insane compared to today. Not only that, but also many considered now all-time cinema masterpieces :-)
hey nice! one of my favorite movies. and yes, the mrs. is right! that IS gale dancing on the beach with her child. watch closely and you can totally tell that's gale. the twist there is that that was the image on the poster but we don't realize that's what it is until it comes to life at the end. oh and in case, you didn't imdb it, that is indeed tony soprano. this is when he really started to make inroads in his acting career both here and in true romance and terminal velocity. yeah and you're completely right that the movie is structured like a tragedy. basically a train wreck that you know is going to happen, you're powerless to stop, AND you can't look away. carlito's personal code made the tragedy inevitable... blanco seems like an exception but even there, it's his personal code of human mercy that prevented him from doing what was prudent and killing off a dangerous enemy. really great movie and depalma at his absolute peak. he also did an amazing job with mission impossible... but after that, it's all downhill from there. but he had an amazing run.
One of Pacino's best movies and Brian De Palma directed some great movies in his prime. Raising Cain is a very cool movie from the early 90's directed by De Palma.
One of my fave movies, once I'd finally convinced a drinking buddy to watch it, every time we went out drinking after that, once we were drunk and one of us suggested moving elsewhere, the other would turn and say "Nah, you stay here" and fake shoot the other. Drunk movie nerds to the end. Thanks for doing the reaction to a movie that gets over looked way too much, I loved it. 😀❤
This is my sixth request to get an “and this is my horse Fritz” joke. Just one time…. I watched this movie on the Encore channel back in 2006 during one of their Mob Movie Marathon weekends. It holds up really well.
I can't believe I never realized...Carlito visiting Kleinfeld at the hospital is VERY similar to the mistake De Niro makes in HEAT! BTW, I hope y'all stuck around to see the little child join Gail dancing on the beach during the credits. Poignant moment.
You recently watched "A Bronx Tale" and this one was released the same year, it's kind of cool that the two legendary gangster actors Pacino and De Niro played the same year roles that subverted their usual gangster archetypes, Pacino as an ex-criminal trying to start a new life and De Niro as a worker teaching his son that gangsters aren't that tough.
This is such an underrated movie. So tense, so enthralling. I think you guys are one of the first ones to react to it! John Leguizamo and Sean Penn steal the whole film :)
The thing about Carlito is things didn't keep pulling him in. Who he was kept pulling him in. That was his way. That was Carlito's way. He couldn't escape himself.
I don't think it was only him fantasy in the end, because in scene u see Gail dancing for a long time, but after a while the baby also appears... in my opinion that's how it ends, with her looking for her happiness on another island with son. Carlito's message that you say, a new better Carlito will be born, this makes you thinking about a transitory phase, a hope for the future even if things didn't go your way.
Glad you liked this movie,it's a favorite of mine in the gangster/mob/organised crime genre. Give Donnie Brasco a try as well even though it did'nt win the poll. Would also recommend Black Mass,Boyz n The Hood, and Menace II Society as well.
Carlitos way and Scarface along with MANY GTA missions which took a whole lot of inspiration from these movies mean my memory of all of these is mixed to hell :)
