The speech paints him as a self-righteous blowhard and something of a showboat, but we begin to see a deeper side of Carlito as he returns to the streets where he was once famous. Facing 30 years in prison, where he expected to die, he got a chance to do some thinking, and now he decides he wants to go straight. A friend has offered him a share in a car rental business in the Bahamas.
To finance his investment, Carlito takes a job at a flashy nightclub, where he's thrown into contact with all the people he should avoid the most. And he meets a young punk who always introduces himself as "Benny Blanco from the Bronx" (John Leguizamo), the kind of hothead Carlito once was. Benny brings out the worst in him.
The movie is narrated by Carlito himself, who explains his hopes, his strategies, and especially his mistakes. One of those is surely to have chosen Kleinfeld as his lawyer. The acting here, by Sean Penn, is a virtuoso tour de force - one of those performances that takes on a life of its own. Penn is hardly recognizable beneath a head of balding, curly hair. He gives the lawyer a spoiled narcissism, a sneakiness and smarminess, and we watch him steadily losing control to cocaine and greed.
Carlito, on the other hand, tries to be a stand-up citizen.
He looks up an old girl friend named Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), who says she dances on Broadway but neglects to explain it's in a strip club. They love each other, after their fashion, but we never sense much depth in their relationship; each one is caught up in the details of personal survival.
Brian De Palma in his best films is a muscular director who relishes over-the-top behavior, and here he paints a gallery of colorful gangsters and lowlifes. The hoods in the movie look borrowed from a production of "Guys and Dolls," the nightclubs look recycled from "Saturday Night Fever," and Al Pacino himself seems to be inspired by his Oscar-winning role in "Scent Of A Woman" (there are times when his Puerto Rican accent migrates uncannily toward the voice of the crusty military man he played in that film).
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