CARLITO’S WAY (Directed by Brian De Palma. Starring Al Pacino, Sean Penn, Penelope Anne Miller)

Brian De Palma is a master of set-ups and set-pieces. Like his cinematic hero, Alfred Hitchcock, he takes the time to let you know where you are before delivering the pay-off. There are a total of two slow but careful set-ups for cinematic tour-de-forces in Carlito’s Way.

The first is an early scene in a pool hall, when ex-gangster Carlito (Al Pacino) finds himself in the middle of a drug deal with every fibre of his criminal frame telling him something bad is going to happen. The scene is stretched to breaking point, De Palma’s cameras scouring every inch of the room, and every character in it, as Carlito desperately tries to improvise his way out of trouble. It is paid off with an explosion of spectacular violence.

The second set-up is the rest of the film. Perhaps appropriately for a story concerning the inevitability of fate, it opens with the aftermath of a shooting, before shifting to flashback, so we know where we’re going from the start, even though it takes two and a half hours to get back there. Which is probably stretching it a bit too far, even for film makers as talented as De Palma and Pacino.

After the taste of blood served up in the pool hall, nothing much happens. We get to know the characters, study the lay of the land and recognise the dilemmas, but it is a slow burn. Fresh out of prison and determined to go straight, Pacino plays a weary but optimistic warhorse, whose old values and criminal loyalties conspire against his best intentions. Like Hamlet (but with more profanity) Carlito is an essay in indecision, the last inaction hero, digging himself into a hole from which there can be no escape. Until, finally, after almost two hours of prevarication, he is forced to act and De Palma serves up an extended, enthralling, forty minute-long pay off, in which he even challenges and outdoes his own Untouchables train station shootout.

De Palma’s chief problem as a director is that, for all his inventive cine literacy and dynamic style he lacks emotional range. Carlito’s Way is built like an epic, but somehow never adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Pacino is watchable, as ever, but Carlito is no Godfather, he isn’t even a Scarface, the compulsive criminal dynamo at the heart of the star and director’s last collaboration. He, too, is in danger of being arrested by the ethnic police. It might be possible to accept Pacino as a Puerto Rican if he wasn’t constantly shadowed by genuine Puerto Rican actors like Luis Guzman, all thicker-tongued and darker than him.

Sean Penn, too, returns from his short retirement with a new ethnic identity, playing a sleazeball Jewish lawyer with a frizzy hairdo that should do for his sex symbol image once and for all. It’s a showy performance without much substance, which could stand as a criticism of the whole enterprise. Yet in its ambitions, and its moments of cinematic grandeur, and in its stunning climax, and in the ineffable Al Pacino, Carlito’s Way is worth a detour.