f13.net forums - Public Service Announcement: Miami Vice

It was one of the spur of the moment things. My girlfriend, my friend and I where having dinner next to the movie theater, and we said lets go see a movie. And it was the only thing playing that late in the evening.

Here is another review that sums it up much better than I did.

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For years, director Michael Mann got to wear the label of “from the creator of Miami Vice” when promoting future projects like the TV series Crime Story and the superior Thomas Harris/Hannibal Lecter adaptation, Manhunter. Whether or not he wore it as a badge of pride is left to him and his ego. After all, “MTV Cops” as the show was called on the side was publicized more for setting fashion trends and having a soundtrack listing each week in USA Today then for its content. The show flourished for five seasons, regardless, and helped paved the way for Mann years later to pursue such loftier ambitions as The Last of the Mohicans, Heat (a remake of his TV film, L.A. Takedown) and his Oscar-nominated The Insider. Mann now returns to deliver the kind of gritty crime drama he had originally conceived (and later sued William Friedkin for ripping off in To Live and Die In L.A.) and instead delivers a lifeless, colorless bore of a procedural that is more like a randomly cobbled version of the superior Heat.
Replacing Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas are Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx as Detectives Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs. Mann puts us on notice right away by viscerally dropping us right into the middle of one of their investigations. In a nightclub deals involving drugs and high-priced hookers are going down and the pair are there to observe as we catch up who is in on the deal and who is undercover - some of whom won’t be revealed until later. A call comes in from one of their former informants (John Hawkes) about covers being blown and bad guys on the move. With everything seemingly going bad and a high-level leak suspected, Crockett & Tubbs want to go deep, deep, deep, DEEP undercover to nail one of the chief drug importers into their blue city.

Their mark is Jose Yero (John Ortiz), just one step on an escalator that leads to Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar), who is so powerful he barely needs to move even when using his mouth to speak. And one of the film’s many problems is that neither of these guys rise above the anonymous villain-of-the-week that the original Crockett & Tubbs took down every Friday night. Phil Collins may have been a ridiculous choice to play a drug dealer, but at least it was notable cause it he was still Phil Collins. Yero & Montoya have no personality, no drive and no true sense of evil. They basically sit behind desks and phones, deciding whether or not to trust our heroes, second-guessing themselves and then hanging up.

A film like Miami Vice must be defined in one of two ways; either as a serious police procedural that’s able to go further than its predecessor ever could or as a modern parable of a Gomorrah that’s beyond saving. Otherwise it’s just a high-falutin’ two-hour plus episode of a TV show that wouldn’t hold a candle to even the mediocre chapters of CSI or The Wire. As personality goes, the film version displays all the life of Iraqi night vision goggles as Mann continues to obsess with his brand of grainy digital cinematography much the way Oliver Stone became with his hyper-vision after JFK and Natural Born Killers. If this is how the dankness of Los Angeles was supposed to look in Collateral, it shouldn’t be the same for the glitziness of Miami whose nightlife is defined by music, color and celebration just as its TV counterpart presented right down to Johnson’s pink T-shirts. What are the drugs destroying and what are the cops fighting for if Miami is just another past-magic-hour city whose picturesque setting couldn’t be captured with flashbulbs and a film restoration crew?

It’s fine if Crockett & Tubbs are meant to be jaded versions of their undercover selves; years of wear & tear through a history of crime and witness to the worst parts of humanity. Except neither barely appear alive. Farrell and Foxx have no chemistry as partners, friends or even males. And that’s Mann’s fault by giving them little to do together. Foxx is reduced to basically having an extended chin beard and barking coordinates into a microphone to such a degree that Mann may as well have given Philip Michael Thomas the job. By default it becomes Farrell’s film (who, despite second billing in the ads, is in nearly every scene) and the film derails almost instantaneously the minute he begins to pursue a relationship with the kingpins’ righthand businesswoman (Gong Li), who isn’t headsmart enough to know when to mix her self-labeled title with pleasure. We don’t believe them together for a second and it dominates a good portion of the second act, leaving us wondering what’s really going on with the case, what progress is being made, what happened to the mysterious agency mole (which is dropped entirely) and is there going to be any action? Be patient – it first comes at the 95-minute mark.

Not that Miami Vice has to be a brimming bullet fest (although it does have some sensational moments of violence), but if all Mann is going to do is remind us of how brilliant the shootout in Heat was during the dark, poorly staged final shootout – then why bother at all? And the comparisons don’t end there. Heat, in its three-hour length, was afforded the time to give us quiet moments between the cops, the robbers and their women; thus amplifying one of its themes of alpha males needing the balance of a strong femme at their side only to be ditched once the juice of adrenaline presented itself as an alternative. Attempted suicides and infidelities only augmented strong characters already well-defined by great actors and solid writing. When Miami Vice pauses to give Crockett & Tubbs downtime in their relationships, its just stalling as it desperately tries to string together the length of three commercial-free episodes that would have been cancelled by the first interruption of #102.

Pretty much all that remains from the show are the names and a revamped suck version of Collins’ In The Air Tonight (the song that helped define the series pilot) over the end credits. There are a few of the “car cruising” shots and about eight different (yet all the same) moments of the “go fast” boats, but little else to keep us from a sleepy haze while we search for any semblance of the strain on our heroes or any intensity for the audience. After the disasterous Ali and the script-challenged Collateral, Mann has flown dangerously past the point of becoming an auteur with only one brushstroke left on his palette and his best work well behind him.