As a director, Brian De Palma is never happier than when he can stop the show for one of his intricately executed, have-camera-will-travel suspense scenes, the kind that allow him to imagine, for a few heady moments, that he really is Alfred Hitchcock. His new thriller, CARLITO'S WAY (R), climaxes with a supremely exciting, 10-minute-long sequence in which the hero, a retired New York Puerto Rican drug dealer named Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino), is chased through subway cars and Grand Central Station by a relentless posse of underworld goons. The fluorescent-lit train is jammed with passengers, and there's something at once scary and funny in the image of the wily-eyed Carlito trying to act casual as he bounds nervously from car to car, his beefy would-be assassins trailing only a few steps behind him. Exiting the subway, Carlito and his pursuers play cat and mouse amid the corridors of Grand Central and end up firing at one another while riding up and down a pair of escalators. You can feel De Palma's joy at devising this ingeniously kinetic showdown-at liberating himself from the pesky burden of plot, dialogue, character.

Speaking of which, Carlito's Way is a competent and solidly unsurprising urban-underworld thriller: De Palma's imitation of a middle-drawer Sidney Lumet movie. Carlito, a fabled heroin dealer, is released from prison after serving 5 years of a 30-year sentence (it turns out he was convicted through the use of illegal wiretaps). Tired and middle-aged, he wants out of the business; he's lost the juice for it-for the risks, the killing. It's the mid-'70s, the era of cocaine, fast sex, and disco glitz, and Carlito takes a job running a dance club partially owned by his oldest and most trusted comrade, the coke-addled mob lawyer David Kleinfeld (Sean Penn). Carlito's plan is to make some quick cash and move out of the country. But he is dragged down by his roots-by his hair-trigger survivor's instincts, honed while he was still a switchblade-wielding street kid, and by his loyalty to Kleinfeld, who tricks Carlito into helping him execute a mob hit.

Scene for scene, Carlito's Way is a smoother piece of filmmaking than Scarface (1983), the only other picture De Palma has made with Pacino. But that bloody, lopsided cocaine thriller had a memorable attraction: the itchy hostility of Pacino's performance as Tony Montana, the Cuban crime boss who was such a glowering, paranoid fireball that he was like a walking id. Here, playing a criminal who turns out to be a deeply honorable man, Pacino is trying for something quieter and more emotional; with his beard and weary stare, he resembles that earnest mensch Ron Silver. Unfortunately, David Koepp's script, based on two novels by New York State Supreme Court justice Edwin Torres, doesn't give Pacino enough to work with. In an early courtroom scene, the actor engages in some grandstanding fireworks (though he never does get a handle on Carlito's accent), and physically he's as coiled and spry as ever. Yet the character as written is so morosely well-intentioned that he's a bit dull. Watching Carlito's Way, I never really believed that a heroin dealer and coolly pragmatic killer could be such a simple, romantic guy.