In 1985, Al Pacino made a movie he called “extraordinary”. It failed so badly it would be his last for four years

Credit: Far Out / 20th Century-Fox

November 4th, 2026 · 6:15pm GMT

In the mid-1980s, Al Pacino was on top of the acting world. Unfortunately, the only way to go from there is down, and he suffered a fall from grace so disastrous he completely withdrew from the industry.

Throughout the 1970s, he was borderline untouchable. He made eight movies during the decade, earned Academy Award nominations for five of them, and at least one other, 1973’s Scarecrow, was a masterpiece, although he’s always had a soft spot for Bobby Deerfield, too.

Admittedly, the ’80s didn’t get off to the strongest start, with William Friedkin’s Cruising becoming a controversy magnet of all the wrong kinds, and even though he notched a Golden Globe nod for ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’ for Author! Author!, it wasn’t exactly a great picture.

In terms of bouncing straight back from consecutive disappointments, though, Scarface was a hell of a way to do it, with Pacino adding another iconic character to his collection as Tony Montana, a protagonist who only continues to find new fans with each passing generation, and at this rate, always will.

Unfortunately, embarrassment was lurking around the next corner. Despite boasting Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson at the helm, 1985’s Revolution was, for lack of a better word, a shitshow. Somewhere between an ego trip and an awful, awful film, and it was more than a little bit of both, the vicious reception cut the leading man as deep as anything ever had.

“It was absolutely destroyed,” he reflected. “There are people who have, throughout the years, known what Hugh Hudson did in that film; some of the work he did in that as a filmmaker is just simply extraordinary. We stopped filming six weeks too early, and we should have gone back.”

Some turds remain incapable of being polished, no matter how hard you try, and while the director’s cut of the four-time Razzie nominee that finally arrived 24 years later was an improvement upon the theatrical edition, it still wasn’t anywhere near good enough to justify Pacino’s use of the word “extraordinary,” because it was still anything but.

Revolution was released in December 1985, and having fallen into such a deep professional depression, the legendary star would retreat with his tail between his legs and go into hiding until September 1989, when Sea of Love marked a triumphant return to the screen, one that would give Pacino the new lease of life that his previous feature had almost robbed him of entirely.

He had to be talked into that one, too, and if he hadn’t, then maybe he would have receded entirely out of the spotlight, and it would have been an ignominious end to a legendary career for someone of Pacino’s talent and reputation to let one wrong move derail everything they’d built up until that point.