Miami Vice

With so many feature film adaptations of TV shows playing up the camp factor, or being straight up parodies of the original program, it's actually kind of a nice change of pace that Miami Vice plays itself completely serious. That being said, the movie plays itself a bit too seriously for its own good. Acclaimed filmmaker Michael Mann (who was involved with the original TV series back in the 80s) has crafted a gritty and visually interesting crime drama with a hollow center that features absolutely nothing for the audience to grab onto. The characters are underwritten personalities who seem more concerned about just standing around looking tough, and the plot is a jumbled mess, giving us very little reason to care or try to follow it. I can see what Mann was trying to do - Create his true updated vision for Vice now that he doesn't have to play by the rules of the network censors. But, in his mad rush to create a great looking film, he forgot to bring a great script to go along with it.

Tough-talking cop duo Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) are given their most recent assignment early in the film. It involves them having to go undercover as transporters and infiltrate a drug running operation, trying to sniff out an intelligence leak. The two get in easy enough, but they find their troubles are just beginning when they quickly find themselves in over their heads. Crockett becomes attracted to the lovely money launderer, Isabella (Gong Li from Memoirs of a Geisha) during his time undercover, and is in danger of threatening the entire operation, since Isabella is currently involved with the head of the cartel (Luis Tosar). The two friends must do their best to keep up appearances until the time is right. However, when Tubbs' private life gets involved, the mission becomes even more personal than before.

Watching Miami Vice is a lot like walking into a two-part episode, and having missed the entire first part. The movie jumps immediately into the action as soon as the studio logo fades (not even bothering with opening titles), and assumes that we are up to speed on the world of Crockett and Tubbs. Since I was seven or eight years old during the time of its popularity, and I have had little desire to catch up on reruns, I felt a bit lost at first. Mann's storytelling moves at a brisk pace, lingering only long enough for us to get a sense for the location, and to see how beautifully he can film it. The movie jumps around, sometimes scenes seemingly coming from nowhere with little lead in. (One minute, our heroes are being grilled about their mission, the next, Tubbs is in a shower making love with his lady friend.) Characters pop up with little or no introduction or lead in. I don't know if these characters were developed or featured on the show or not, but I have a feeling that Mann made this movie for a specific audience, and I unfortunately was not part of the crowd.

When the plot finally kicks in, the pace starts to slow down a little. This is both good and bad. It is good, because it gives us enough chance to get to know the characters. The bad side is that the movie doesn't seem interested in letting us get to know them, and just skims the surface. The relationship between Crockett and Isabella seems to come almost out of the blue. They exchange a few words, and then suddenly, they speeding off to Cuba for drinks and sex. Granted, I can certainly see the physical attraction that Crockett sees in her, but their love seems to almost exist because Mann wanted this to be a hard R, and needed to throw in some nude scenes of the two actors. When they return from their little sex vacation, the character of Isabella seems to almost be forgotten. She pops up from time to time, but she spends such little time with Crockett the rest of the movie, we almost wonder what the point was. Even the professional relationship between Crockett and Tubbs seems oddly unconvincing, because they hardly say two words to each other every time Farrell and Foxx are in the same scene together. They mainly spend all of their scenes talking to someone else as they stand next to each other, and when they are alone, they seem like they wish they were with someone else. A little bit of bonding of any sort between the two would have helped strengthen their partnership and friendship with each other, and would have made them more personable to us.

It's really too bad that the script and the characters are so shallow, because Miami Vice really does look like a million. Taking a cue from his last film, Collateral, Mann shoots the film in a gritty and sometimes sort of grainy style that perfectly fits the mood of the story. The movie uses its exotic locations well, and even the local settings are beautiful. An opening scene set in a Miami night club is awash with color, blazing lights, exotic dancers, and a strong visual sense to tie all the madness together without making the scene confusing or overwhelming. The action sequences (what few there are) are also appropriately exciting and fast paced, with some well done and realistic gunplay that never becomes overly showy or stylized. The violence is strong, but also handled tastefully so that it never comes across as being exploitive. The one and only aspect to the film's look that I can object to is that Mann seems to like to set his nighttime scenes with flashes of lightning in the background for dramatic effect. I don't know if this was intentional, or if most of the night shoots just had the luck of being shot during an approaching storm. It was kind of cool the first time I saw it, but by the time the fourth nighttime scene was accompanied by occasional flashing lightning for dramatic effect, it kind of started to reach the point of self parody.

The casting is an all around mixed bag. While most of the actors are fine, they just never get to breathe life into their thin characters. As mentioned before, Farrell and Fox seem to have little chemistry together, mainly because they don't get to interact with each other all that much. On their own, both men are fine, but none have any particular scene where they get to shine. Chinese actress Gong Li as Isabella is beautiful as always in her biggest English-speaking role yet, but she still has a ways to go, as it can sometimes be hard to understand her dialogue. The rest of the cast is mainly forgettable. The villains are all cliched drug runner types that seem to have walked in from a Scarface audition, and the people who work alongside Farrell and Fox on the side of the law I recall very little about.

Miami Vice is the perfect definition of style over substance. Okay, the TV show probably followed the same formula, but still, Mann had a big opportunity to dig deep into the characters and reinvent them, and he all but squanders the opportunity with this immediately forgettable and overly stylized crime drama. Maybe the film's faults stem from the fact that someone so close to the original show was in charge. He probably knows more about the characters and their world than even the fans do, and he forgot to truly open up that world to the audience. While not a terrible movie, Miami Vice is an extremely disappointing one that is just not very fun to watch.

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