director/screenwriter
Michael
Mann
based on
characters created by
Anthony
Yerkovich
producers
Pieter Jan Brugge
Michael Mann
cinematographer
Dion Beebe
music
Klaus Badelt
Mark Batson
John Murphy
Organized Noize
editors
William Goldenberg
Paul Rubell
cast
Colin Farrell (Crockett)
Jamie Foxx (Tubbs)
Gong Li (Isabella)
Naomie Harris (Trudy)
Ciarán Hinds (FBI Agent Fujima)
Justin Theroux (Det. Larry Zito)
Barry Shabaka Henley (Lt. Castillo)
Luis Tosar (Arcángel de Jesús Montoya)
John Ortiz (José Yero)
Elizabeth Rodriguez (Det. Calabrese)
John Hawkes (Alonzo)
Tom Towles (Coleman)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 146m
u.s.
release: 7/28/06
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other michael
mann films
reviewed on this website:
- collateral
- heat
- the insider
- manhunter
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I have fond memories of the
'80s show Miami Vice (it fits right in there with Moonlighting
and St. Elsewhere among the oddball, only-in-the-'80s
series). Colorful yet morose, though not without comic relief,
the show was a one-two punch of music and unforgettable moments.
All these years later I remember the 1985 episode "Evan,"
with William Russ as a freaky undercover agent who opened the
show by emptying a Mac-10 into some mannequins to the strains
of Peter Gabriel's spooky "Rhythm of the Heat"; he
ended it on the receiving end of a gun, while Gabriel's eligiac
"Biko" wailed. Another notorious episode, "Out
Where the Buses Don't Run," ended with corpses discovered
walled up in a cop's house while Mark Knopfler sadly mumbled
his way through "Brothers in Arms."
Those two episodes, more than
twenty years old now, come back to me far more vividly than the
new Miami Vice film does a few hours after I've seen it.
Writer-director Michael Mann was the show's executive producer,
and, stealing equally from MTV and Brian De Palma's Scarface,
he inaugurated a neon-noir style simmering in pleasure
and sin. Miami Vice was a movie on your little screen
every Friday night. The actual movie, ironically, looks like
television -- bad television. Apparently married to high-def
video, regardless of how crappy it looks during available-light
night shooting, Mann has made an extended Miami Vice episode
(very extended, at two hours and twenty-six minutes) that
would've been laughed off the show for lack of style. Or, rather,
it has a style -- pompous, gritty non-style.
It wouldn't surprise me to
learn that Michael Mann only undertook this project to prevent
a farcical Miami Vice movie (along the lines of the Ben
Stiller/Owen Wilson Starsky &
Hutch) from being made. In every way, it's a step backward
for him. The story is more of the same grim, clenched, masculine
bang-bang familiar from Mann's Thief and Heat,
with no special quirks other than having Gong Li as a Chinese-Cuban
(huh?) gangster's assistant. Once more, Crockett and Tubbs (here
Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx) go undercover to infiltrate a drug
ring, and that's pretty much all there is to it. Mann may think
he's being minimalist and rigorous -- paring away most of the
show's humor and personality and cutting, Mamet-like, down to
the bone -- but this is a pretty heavy and lumbering skeleton.
I appreciated a firefight late
in the game -- Mann eschews the usual blam-blam sound effects
and opts for war-zone realism, with automatics going thupthupthup
and bullets clanking loudly against metal. But this Miami
Vice is lugubrious, its dialogue purely functional when it
isn't tough-guy attitudinizing (my favorite was a female cop's
rewrite of Dirty Harry's "Do you feel lucky, punk?"
speech). Farrell and Foxx are not without charm, but you wouldn't
know it here -- they mostly scowl and mutter throughout the proceedings.
Farrell lacks Don Johnson's inimitable knowingness (Johnson's
manner said "Look, I know you're scamming me; what else
you got?"), and Foxx misses Philip Michael Thomas' suave
self-regard (though his hairline is more razor-sharp than ever).
Typically, the few actors allowed to break out of the malaise
-- John Hawkes as a panicked snitch, Tom Towles as a heavy who
can spot a fed mole a mile away -- aren't around much. Also typically,
the women are bitterly pragmatic but thinly written -- though
that isn't quite sexism here, as the men are equally paper-ish.
The more I think about it,
the more I would've welcomed that Miami Vice comedy --
sure, bring on Will Ferrell as Crockett and Will Smith as Tubbs
-- because, at the very least, it would've brought back those
neons and those pastels. In a satirical way, it would've respected
the show more than this movie does. Michael Mann seems to have
set out to extricate everything that made the show fun and original
-- either that or he retooled an existing generic cop script,
renamed the characters, and slapped the Miami Vice title
on it. The movie's soundtrack, with its awful Nonpoint (boy,
there's an apt name for the band) cover of Phil Collins'
"In the Air Tonight" and its posturing grunge-grime
rock, completes the blasphemy. They couldn't have brought the
Jan Hammer theme song out of mothballs just for old time's sake?
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