Plot Summary (Scarface) Scarface

Tony Montana talks his way out of a refugee camp and into America

In May 1980, Fidel Castro opens the harbor at Mariel, Cuba, and 125,000 refugees flood into South Florida. Among them is Tony Montana (Al Pacino), a convict with a pitchfork tattoo and a talent for self-invention. Detained in a refugee processing camp under a highway overpass, Tony charms and bullies his way through an immigration interview, claiming he learned English from Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney. When the officers push too hard, the charm drops: "I'm Tony Montana, a political prisoner from Cuba. I want my fucking human rights, now!"

Tony and his best friend Manny Ribera (Steven Bauer) earn their green cards by assassinating a former Castro official named Emilio Rebenga during a camp riot. The transaction is the first of many: freedom for murder, advancement for violence.

A cocaine deal gone wrong proves Tony can survive anything

Working as dishwashers, Tony and Manny are recruited by Omar Suarez (F. Murray Abraham) for a cocaine buy at a Miami Beach hotel. The deal goes catastrophically wrong. The Colombian dealers, led by Hector the Toad, tie Tony's associate Angel to a shower curtain rod and dismember him with a chainsaw. Tony, watching his friend die, keeps his nerve long enough to grab a gun and shoot his way out with both the cocaine and the money.

The chainsaw scene is the audition. Tony brings the drugs directly to Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia), bypassing Omar, and Frank — impressed by a man who survived what his other employees could not — brings Tony into the organization.

Tony meets the woman he wants and the boss he plans to replace

At the Babylon Club, Frank's Miami nightclub, Tony encounters Elvira Hancock (Michelle Pfeiffer), Frank's girlfriend. She rejects him with a totality that should end the conversation: "Even if I were blind, desperate, starved and begging for it on a desert island, you'd be the last thing I'd ever fuck." Tony walks away grinning. The eyes, he tells Manny, never lie.

Tony declares his philosophy to Manny on a Miami street: "First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women." The three-step formula becomes the film's structural blueprint — and its thesis about the emptiness of each step once achieved.

Bolivia, betrayal, and the unauthorized empire

Tony travels to Bolivia to meet Alejandro Sosa (Paul Shenar), a cultured drug lord who recognizes Tony's directness as an asset. Tony negotiates an $18 million cocaine deal that Frank never authorized. During the visit, Sosa exposes Omar as a police informant and hangs him from a helicopter while Tony watches through binoculars without flinching.

Back in Miami, Frank is furious about the unauthorized deal but powerless to undo it. Tony courts Elvira openly, pays off a corrupt detective named Mel Bernstein, and beats a man bloody for touching his sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) at the Babylon Club. When Frank sends hitmen to kill Tony and they fail, Tony walks into Frank's office and has him executed. He recruits Frank's bodyguard on the spot, collects Elvira, and inherits the empire.

The empire rots from the inside

Tony has everything he declared he wanted — the money, the power, the woman — and each acquisition begins to decay immediately. The money itself is the first problem: laundering fees climb as the IRS tightens its grip on South Florida, and Tony's banker calls his bluff when he threatens to move the cash himself.

Cocaine addiction accelerates the erosion. Tony berates Elvira for her drug use while doing cocaine himself. He cuts Manny out of the business, demoting him from partner to junior partner. Alone in a room, Tony delivers a soliloquy to no one: "Who put this thing together? Me! That's who! Who do I trust? Me!" The IRS catches Tony on videotape with $1.3 million undeclared in a money-laundering sting, and he faces five years in prison.

Sosa's bargain and the line Tony will not cross

Sosa offers to fix Tony's legal problems in exchange for assassinating a journalist who is about to expose Bolivian drug-government corruption on 60 Minutes. Tony agrees without hesitation. In New York, Alberto plants a radio-controlled bomb under the journalist's car. But when the journalist's wife and children climb into the car, Tony draws a line: "What do you think I am? You think I kill two kids and a woman? Fuck that!" He shoots Alberto in the head.

The refusal — Tony's single act of moral clarity — is the act that seals his death. Sosa declares war.

Everything collapses in sequence

At a restaurant, Tony's marriage disintegrates in public. He calls Elvira a junkie, tells the room her womb is so polluted he cannot have a child with her, and she walks out for good. Then he delivers the "bad guy" speech to a room of wealthy diners: "You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers and say, 'That's the bad guy.'"

Tony's mother tells him Gina has been living in a house in Coconut Grove. Tony drives there and finds Manny at the door in a bathrobe. Gina appears: "We got married just yesterday." Tony shoots Manny dead without a word.

The last stand beneath THE WORLD IS YOURS

Back at his mansion, Tony buries his face in a mountain of cocaine. Gina, brought there against her will, confronts him with the accusation the film has built toward: "Is this what you want, Tony? You can't stand for another man to be touching me." She fires a gun and misses. A stray bullet from Sosa's invading kill squad kills her.

Tony picks up his M16 with its grenade launcher, opens the door, and addresses the army in his foyer: "Say hello to my little friend!" He fights through the mansion absorbing dozens of bullets, screaming that they need a fucking army to take him, that he is Tony Montana. The Skull, Sosa's assassin, shoots him from behind with a shotgun. Tony falls from the balcony into the ornamental fountain. The camera pulls back to reveal the globe above the pool, inscribed: THE WORLD IS YOURS.

A title card dedicates the film to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht.