![]() ![]() This crucial early-film sequence, which builds to its blazing guns with lurking dread and inimitable style courtesy of director Brian De Palma, also inspired the film’s poster image: Pacino – or PACINO, as the poster text tells us – silhouetted against a wall (a bathroom wall in the actual film, made to look more like an alley on the poster), holding his gun. He’s not gonna die, big time or small time, at least not yet. ![]() As it turns out, everyone else is already dead, or nearly there, and Carlito Brigante is able to slip away from the shoot-out with a single flesh wound. Carlito himself is out of bullets, relying on his bravado (and at least a few dead bodies, courtesy of his crack shooting a few minutes earlier) to save his skin. Carlito calls it out from a bathroom where he worries he may be cornered he’s hoping to evoke his larger-than-life reputation, and then slams open the bathroom door without coming through it, hoping to draw out any remaining enemies so he can tell what he’s up against. ![]() What the ads understandably elided, however, was that in the film itself, Pacino booms that line out as a bluff, into something of a void. In that sense, it’s not misleading: Carlito’s Way contains violent stand-offs and white-knuckle suspense, easily standing with Pacino’s best. “You think you’re big time? You’re gonna die big time!” That line, as hollered by Al Pacino, was all over the trailers and ads for Carlito’s Way back in 1993, selling it as an intense gangster thriller in the tradition of Pacino’s past forays into a life of crime. ![]()
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