The villain is not controlled by any moral or legal code

They acknowledge no obligation to anyone or to any power other than their own overwhelming grudge against society.

Ready to shrug off their humanity, they become monsters.

Their charisma comes from appealing to our base instincts. Being outcasts, they have the objectivity that comes with belonging to no particular side. This gives them a remorseless broad-mindedness; a sense and sensibility that’s ultimately seductive.

Like the high school rebel who breaks all the rules and all the adolescent girls’ hearts, all the boys want to be like the villain.

As criminals, their way of life leads you to ask: is a man’s worth dependent on his honesty, or on his willingness to break the rules? Is his character a function of his social or economic relationships, or do his criminalities possess a value independent of his place in the community?

Tony Montana is a true villain. He is sure his greatness lies entirely in himself, and not in how you perceive him.

“I never f--ked anybody over in my life didn’t have it coming to them. You got that? All I have in this world is my balls and my word and I don’t break them for no one. Do you understand?” he says.

His passions are extreme, his violence extravagant. Although he has family, he is the classic loner, entrusted to trust nobody.

We condemn him not on moral grounds, but on political grounds. That’s because we unconsciously believe that no individual can count as much as the rules of the community.

“Who are you not to follow the rules?” we ask.

These rules, written or unwritten, are a binding force which, regardless of whether we believe in them or not, are above us all.

When we disobey them, we unleash the savagery of man. Thereafter, we are nothing but animals.

“The man who is incapable of working in common, or who in his self-sufficiency has no need of others, is no part of the community,” wrote the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Such a man is “like an animal or a god.”

Montana is a prime example of such animalism over the primacy of our collective belief in community as expressed by societal rules.

In his gangsterism, he becomes both beast and god: killing, robbing and seducing his way to the heavenly top.

“Okay, here’s the story. I come from the gutter. I know that. I got no education but that’s okay. I know the street, and I’m making all the right connections. With the right woman, there’s no stopping me. I could go right to the top,” he boasts without bragging.

Montana comes from a world in which the distinction between the honest and the thug has been erased, “the same honour waits for the coward and the brave. They both go down to death.”

Montana knows this and so he is unfazed, unimpressed and uninspired by moral convention. Always true to himself, he can never be absorbed by a hypocritical society.

The compromising demands of society will never filter into his uncompromising sense of self, the group can have its façade of white-collar progress. But he knows it’s all a scam.

“You know what capitalism is? Getting f--ked!”

This realisation turns him into a beast, but also a god. For he is not under the control of any law; he is the law unto himself.

However, those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first give vanity. Which is the drug of choice of all those who think the world is not enough.

“I’m Tony Montana! You f--k with me, you f--kin’ with the best!”

In Montana’s case, vanity mixed with cocaine explodes into a frenzy of rage which reduces his body to a bullet-ridden corpse. But, as expected, he doesn’t go out without a fight.

“Go ahead! I take your f--king bullets! You think you kill me with bullets? I take your f--king bullets! Go ahead!”

This is how Montana shot cinematic immortality.