Mountain Xpress' Ken Hanke:
"In the film, Latif is a soldier who is first asked to be Uday's double, then tortured and finally blackmailed into taking the job to protect his family. This perhaps redefines the idea of an "offer he can't refuse," but that's probably deliberate because the film paints Uday as a gangster -- and it does the same, to some extent, to his father Saddam (Philip Quast). It just happens that the Husseins run a country, rather than a crime syndicate. In fact, quite a few people have likened the presentation of Uday to the Al Pacino character in Brian De Palma's 1983 remake of Scarface. The comparison is not without merit, though I'd say Uday wins in the raging-lunatic department."

Marshall and the Movies:
"That being said, unfortunately, most of the redeeming value of The Devil’s Double begins and ends with Dominic Cooper’s breakthrough performance. It’s a classic example of a good actor ruined by a ho-hum movie that spoils the chance of him getting the attention he really deserves. Director Lee Tamahori is where I place the root of these problems. The guy must have set out to make Scarface in Iraq because at times it just feels like a cry for Brian De Palma and Al Pacino to notice him. Clearly he’s a little too adrenaline-happy trying to replicate Tony Montana because the movie just goes way over the top in ways that it doesn’t need to go there."

Sabotage Times' Richard Luck:
"For a short while there, it looked like Dominic Cooper was going to become the next big thing in British film. A standout in both the stage and film versions of The History Boys and one of the few decent things about Starter For 10, the boy from Greenwich might have been a touch on the short side but he had charisma to burn. Then there was that rather wet supporting turn in the otherwise pretty decent The Duchess and that part in Mamma Mia! which no doubt paid a fortune but came at the price of his testicles. If it wasn’t for his good work in The Escapist and An Education, you could have been forgiven for thinking James Corden’s former housemate was but the latest in a long line of could-have-beens.

But now The Devil’s Double has arrived and all such doubts have disappeared. For in this fact-based story of the man hired to impersonate Saddam Hussein’s playboy son Uday, our man gives a performance that’s so over-the-top and entertaining, it can’t help but recall Al Pacino’s to-the-edge work in Scarface. Of course, this latest offering from the cross-dressing Kiwi Lee Tamahori doesn’t hit the same heights as Brian De Palma’s crime epic. It’s an engaging picture, though, featuring genuinely witty dialogue and a clutch of fine supporting turns. And while Cooper’s double performance could have come on like the worst sort of acting stunt, he’s so good you wouldn’t be surprised if he copped a nomination (or maybe two) when the BAFTAs come around next year."

The Guardian's John Patterson:
"Uday's a handful, living out some Baathist-inflected fantasia on De Palma's Scarface, shooting off guns indoors, plucking schoolgirls off the streets and raping them, exercising Caligulan droit du seigneur over a war hero's new bride, prompting her suicide, and mutilating and disembowelling his own dad's food-taster at a banquet to honour Mrs Hosni Mubarak (par-TAY!). Scotch, vodka, cigars, cocaine, heroin, porn, torture, rape and murder are his toys and his games, so he's the most nightmarish playmate you can imagine. And with all these mirrors and doppelgangers, it's like a psychopathic remake of The Parent Trap."

Mother Jones' Asawin Suebsaeng:
"But The Devil's Double's biggest problems stem from its inability to decide whether it wants to be a morality play, an exploitation flick, Scarface in Mesopotamia, or a Greek tragedy."

The New York Times' Mike Hale
"Colombiana isn’t content to be a comic-book joyride (though it is that); it has pretensions to a more turgid class of revenge melodrama, along the lines of Tony Scott’s Man on Fire. It also has pretensions, period: Mr. Megaton sprinkles in homages to Francis Ford Coppola (Ms. [Zoe] Saldana’s rising out of the water like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now) and Brian De Palma (the climactic sequence at a drug lord’s lair is redolent of Scarface). The overall effect is distancing; there are some early comic moments that have you laughing along with the movie, but eventually the clashing tones and preposterousness just have you laughing."

Advance Screening's Matthew Fong
"Were your parents murdered in front of you as a child? Well Cataleya’s were and she instantly plotted revenge. There’s something eerily cute when a little 9 year-old girl replies to the question, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' with 'a killer' (in a Colombian accent). She reads Xena: Warrior Princess and wants to become a warrior princess herself. Cliff Curtis plays Emilio Restrepo, Cataleya’s uncle, who takes care of her and trains her to become an assassin. He sets her up in his late son’s room which is filled with guns and a poster of Scarface so you can see what her influences were."

Movieline's Jen Yamato
"...watching the film there are a handful of notable nods to Colombiana’s genre predecessors — basically, every Luc Besson movie, The Professional and La Femme Nikita, and even a touch of Scarface."

indieWIRE's Drew Taylor
"Instead of a young American girl tutored by an aging French hitman, though [as in Léon], Colombiana is first set in Colombia, with the aforementioned parent-murdering (the little girl’s father was involved in some shady cartel business). The little girl then goes to Chicago where she’s taken in by her equally shady uncle (Cliff Curtis). The little girl, named Cataleya Restrepo, after a rare Amazonian orchid, wants her uncle to teach her how to murder, which he rejects by randomly firing his gun at a passing car (and presumably killing a perfectly innocent pedestrian). “Is that what you want?” he asks her, passion bubbling in his Al Pacino-in-Scarface-accented voice. She says no, she’ll wait, but it’s a shocking, clumsy moment that the audience barely has any time to recover from.

The movie then snaps forward 15 years, to Los Angeles, where Cataleya is now grown and carrying out a cleverly elaborate hit job in a local prison. Her target is Latin American, and she brands the corpse with her signature (a curlicue scribble of her namesake), so we assume that this victim had something to do with her parents’ murder. It adds a juicy jolt of thrills to the ingeniously plotted maneuver, which has all the hallmarks of a great Mission: Impossible jaunt, with the added bonus of Saldana pouring herself into a slinky black catsuit."

Not A Supermom
"And after a hard day of killing, there’s nothing Catalaya likes to do better than to return home, strip off, do a little sexy-dance around her empty apartment, take a shower and then spend a full minute eating a lollipop. Just like Pacino in Scarface! There are a few call-backs to Scarface in this movie, as well as the Lethal Weapon franchise. When she visits the FBI agent tracking her, you can almost hear him say that he’s 'too old for this'…stuff... Thankfully, Catalaya abstains from post-mortem one-liners. But feel free to add some in your own head throughout the movie. When she is standing on a balcony in the mansion and raining bullets down on the cartel henchmen, I defy you not to think 'Say hello to my little friend'."

Tr3s' Michael Lopez
"The final invasion on El Don is something straight out of Scarface, complete with machine guns, grenades, and choreographed head butts. Unfortunately, every action moment in this movie felt a bit too familiar. Cataleya's jail escapes mirrored Mission Impossible, her fights seemed like Guy Ritchie retreads, and so on. Colombiana definitely brings the action, but somehow lacks the punch."

Associated Press

Watch the Live Scarface cast reunion tomorrow night (Tuesday, August 23rd) at 11:15pm eastern, on livestream. Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Robert Loggia, F. Murray Abraham, and producer Martin Bregman are all expected to take part in the live reunion. All but Loggia have worked with Brian De Palma on more than one occasion, so it should be a fun discussion.