Miami Vice (2006) Reviews

• Solid but underwhelming

  maxwellsmart2006-07-29

  Due to Michael Mann's track record it was hard to go into this movie without very high expectations. After all, we are talking about the creator of arguably the greatest crime drama/thriller ever made with "Heat", as well as the highly entertaining "Collateral". But "Miami Vice" fails to live up to Mann's past success in the crime genre. The plot is completely ordinary and doesn't offer up any unexpected twists and turns along the way. Because of this, the movie lacks intensity through much of the first and second acts, when everything that's happening is completely predictable. However, pedestrian plot aside, the biggest disappointment was the manner in which the characters were developed. Both "Collateral" and "Heat" were notable for the way in which they delved deep into the psyche of the central characters, providing compelling personal drama to go along with the heists, hits and gunplay. But in "Miami Vice", we never really get to know the characters or their motivations beyond the surface level. And to make matters worse, Foxx and Farrell never develop the kind of rapport that's necessary to make a movie like this work on a high level. Compare Foxx and Farrell to Johnson and Thomas, or Gibson and Glover, and you'll see what I mean. Even though the "Miami Vice" movie aspires to be darker and grittier than "Lethal Weapon", which it is, it fails to be as dramatic because we never really come to care about the characters all that much. While there was clearly a conscious decision to downplay the "buddy" elements of the movie, the result is that Crockett and Tubbs seem so disconnected from each other on a personal level that it's hard to buy that they would die for each other, which we are expected to believe. The only relationship that is at all convincing or fleshed out is between Crockett and Isabella. The rest seem decidedly distant and undercooked. What saves the film from being a bust is the visual splendor and great action sets. Mann once again proves that when it comes to creating a gritty atmosphere and staging shootouts, he's among the best in the business. When it comes to style, visuals, and atmosphere, "Miami Vice" is top notch. In the end perhaps what hurt this movie most was studio deadlines and delays while shooting. It's been widely reported that Michael Mann had to feverishly edit this film just to get it into theaters on time, and in many ways that shows. There are multiple loose ends that are never tied up or explained, and several plot threads seem underdeveloped. I'm sure some day we will see a director's cut which approaches the 3 hour mark just like "Heat", and perhaps that version will overcome of the issues involving character development and plot holes in the theatrical version. Until then, "Miami Vice" is a movie that, while far from being a total failure, is none-the-less disappointing in that it had the potential to be a much more complete film than it is.

• Liquid Cinema: Part 1

  tieman642009-10-08

  "All is flux, nothing is stationary." - Heraclitus "Miami Vice", "The Departed" and "The Black Dahlia" were all released in 2006. "The Departed" went on to do big business and win several key awards, whilst "Dahlia" and "Vice" did nothing but annoy audiences tremendously. Their characters were ciphers, the films had little action and despite their tremendous visual style, their plots were a giant bore. I myself found both films almost painful to sit through when first seeing them in theatres. But time has a way of putting everything in its proper place. Today I find Scorsese's film intolerable and have since seen "Vice" and "Dahlia" over five times, the later two films revealing themselves, with subsequent viewings, to be truly spectacular. But isn't that always the case with great films? You're unprepared, they leave you baffled and your immediate response is always to react with hostility. The "Miami Vice" television series was renowned for its flashy cars, cool clothes, sexy women and glossy look. Police detectives Tubbs and Crockett were as interested in their designer sunglasses and exotic sports cars as they were in catching criminals. The TV series celebrated superficiality and vapid aesthetics. The "Vice" film, however, is one of profound numbness. This is an anti-procedural in which the characters are all desensitised to aesthetics, director Michael Mann opening the film with Linkin Park's "Numb Encore" before throwing his audience headlong into a police story so dense and alien that we immediately become as suffocated as the characters on screen. Tubbs and Crockett have themselves been on the job for so long that everything has long lost its sex appeal. The clothes, cars and exotic locales are now all completely banal. Life has been bled of colour, their toys have been bled of value and everything has a hollow, empty feel. The film's plot – the detectives going undercover to infiltrate a criminal organisation – is both unoriginal and unimportant. This is a tone poem, a big budget art movie in the vein of Wong Kar-wai and Antonioni, Mann more interested in crafting a low-key crime story in which business is conducted with the existential detachment of Jean-Pierre Melville. When late in the film Tubbs says to his partner, "So, fabricated identity, and what's really up, collapses into one frame. You ready for that on this one?", he's speaking of his partner's ability to distinguish between the professional life of a police officer and the domestic realm of romance. But on another level, the film is about the collapsing of identities in a larger sense, the archetypal police hero robbed of all energy, hopelessly fragmented, numb and reduced. The film itself is bookended by the lyrics "I'm tired of being what you want me to be, feeling so faithless lost under the surface" and "one of these mornings, they will look for me and I'll be gone", both movie and cast bleeding off into melancholic nothingness. The flashy universe of the "Miami Vice" TV series, with its boundless money, its 80s excess, its glitzy materialism, has been torn open to reveal a vast network hidden deep within. If De Palma's "Scarface", released a year before Mann's TV series, exposes the banality of wealth, of pop individualism, of our very own post modern aesthetic, then "Vice" the movie tries – like HBO's "The Wire" - to map capitalism's unmappable network of corruption and money. This is a complex and illegible world in which it has become impossible to interact if not in a peripheral manner. Everything is in flux, moving, changing hands too quick for minds to process, let alone affect. Money, relationships and people are always in transition. By the film's end, a leak in the heart of a government agency has not been plugged, the villains escape and Crockett loses his girl. Nothing is resolved and everything is liquid. Liquid money, liquid people, liquid jobs, liquid relationships. Everything moves and it moves fast. The detectives themselves embody divergent movements. Tubbs is focused, a man of stability, both in his love life and professionally, whilst Crockett is unpredictable, unbalanced and instinctive. He's always gazing out at the horizon, yearning for that utopian "beach paradise" that all Mann's heroes long for. But "Vice's" utopia differs significantly from the paradisaical longings of the men in "Collateral", "Manhunter", "Thief", "Public Enemies" and "Heat". Those characters all failed to actualise their idyllic havens because they were unable to separate the "professional" from the "domestic". But the lesson that "Vice" teaches is that the modern man is permanently disembodied. There is no "actual", no "real", to connect to. The human being has disappeared and dematerialised into the heart of an urban universe governed by technology and money. The post urban world is a confused and atomized mass held together only by the financial tendrils that cross it and the electronic images that recreate the simulacrum. Crockett thinks he can resist this global system, thinks he can carve out a place of "tranquillity" that exists outside the flux. But this place no longer exists. In a world where a rapid edit is all that separates Miami beach from the slums of Columbia, where money darts back and forth on go-fast boats, where "product" circles the globe in Learjets, where identities are readily forged, created and abandoned at the click of a button, how can one truly hope to tear themselves away from the global system? Man literalizes these themes toward the and of the film, when a sliding camera motion tracks the entwined hands of Tubbs and his lover. This same horizontal motion charters the disconnect between Crockett and his girl as she leaves on a boat (and their abandoned safe house). If Tubbs and his lover have connection in motion, it is only because they occupy the same professional space. But even this connection is fragile and hopelessly volatile. (Part 2 of this essay can be found in my review of "Thief")

• Cool. Bring your iPod to drown out the talking.

  anandare2006-07-31

  A die-hard Michael Mann fan, I deeply respect all of his prior work and hold "Thief" and "Heat" in the highest regard. I essentially went into the theater to watch Miami Vice expecting a reaction similar to when I viewed "Ali" and "Collateral" on the big screen. I expected to see the big Mann pull off what I didn't think anyone else could pull off... restructuring the perception of a specific actor and producing an engaging and resonating plot in an otherwise skeptical script idea. In "Ali" I didn't believe Will Smith was the right choice but he worked and Jamie Foxx as Bundini was amazing. In hindsight I understood why he focused solely on the height of Ali's career. When "Collateral" was announced, I had severe doubts as to the believability of the plot, the choice of Tom Cruise as a villain and the decision to shoot on High Definition video. I've watched those two movies several times over and love them both. So it was with Miami Vice that I didn't think Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx as a team were right for the roles. I also believed that the idea of recreating Miami Vice was a pure marketing scheme. I gave Michael Mann the benefit of the doubt considering he directed the TV series that I barely remember since I was only an adolescent. My only knowledge of Colin Farrell was that he was an Irish dude in "Minority Report". I was afraid Jamie Foxx would be a continuation of his "Collateral" "Max" character after he finds his balls. Sure enough, for the first time, Michael Mann didn't sidestep my opinions. From the first scene in the nightclub, Jamie Foxx has taken over the actions of Tom Cruise. Break a bodyguard, step on him and look up past the camera. That was a great maneuver in Collateral, now I think it's cheese. So he's a tough dude. Colin Farrell is a charmer we learn immediately. So we'll expect sex scenes. Yeah. Too bad the characters are in the same camera shot but miles apart chemistry wise. It's just emotionally cold sex. There's no sense of a symbiotic relationship between Farrell and Foxx either. Both of them just seem to immediately know how to get things done and don't really do anything together that one couldn't do alone or with a randomly assigned partner. Their characters dominate every scene of possible tension and diffuse it immediately. Which is what I consider to be the film's second greatest weakness, the lack of tension and drama. We have to watch talk scenes. Characters talk to characters. Deceive characters by talking. Talk about deceiving by talking. Then fly or pilot a speedboat to talk somewhere else and talk over the phone. All quick witted and distant. It's all supposed to keep the audience wondering and guessing. Which is what it does, makes you wonder why any of it matters and try to guess if there will be any action or resonance with a character. Which is the film's greatest weakness. You can't relate to any of the characters. All you are watching is a bunch of ethnically and gender diverse bad asses with cool cars, helicopters and boats go about being bad ass talkers and shooters. All presented in very fantastic heroism jumbled by dialogue, dialogue and more dialogue. The only excitement comes from basic shootouts with shock value due to the timing of action and subsequent gore. But I'm not sure they're exceptional other than how they effectively remove you from the slow anxiety of watching the film not mean anything. The final one in particular seems like a low budget night rehash of the Heat shootout in the dark on grainy video with subpar sound effects. There's no need to care for the characters. Gong Li is the film's only redemption. She acts with her body. Probably because she's not very good with English. It seems like one of the movie's major intents was to instill minority actors into invincible heroic roles. The white FBI agent is incompetent. White trash and jealous Latino dudes are the baddies, a random black pimp is just left to be. Come watch them get graphically shot to pieces by men and women of color. There's no internal development or conflict. They all talk and stare like Max at his turning point in Felix's club in "Collateral". There's no fear. Come in get the job done. Get er done! And we as the audience have to admire them for their cool cars and cool actions. Maybe only cool people like this movie. There's no depth or passion to any of it. Just cool people being cool in coolly stylized shots. And you won't even care about the questions it leaves unanswered cuz it's not cool to stress out over it. You might feel jealous or passionate and get shot in your "inner medulla by a bullet going 2750 feet per second". I hope this isn't the start of Mediocre Michael Mann. The idea pains my heart.

• Cinematic adaptation from classic TV with action, suspense and violence

  ma-cortes2007-10-15

  This is a story about being undercover, and what happens when you go deep undercover.Particularly if you're doing an operation in a foreign country, where your badge doesn't count and where you can't have SWAT team surveillance you, and people are not in contact, you really are out on the edge. It's the allure of doing that undercover work and what happens to you when you're deep in that role of that fabricated identity. These roles protagonists(Colin Farrell,Jamie Foxx as Sonny Crockett and Tubbs) are filled by real deal. This is a cool film directed by Michael Mann. He tells that his ambitions with a picture like that was to really go exploring into some of diverse areas. It's shot in location Scout, South America. One of the exciting things about Michael Mann is the choosing real location all the time. We're dealing with environment that can often surprise us. Whether it's the light, whether it's dramatic moment with the sky, or some interior or some sort of background action that would not have happened in a controlled backlog situation. Michael gets this slickness, finding places, that, you know , that aren't even on the map.He makes as real as he possibly can. He's all about, why fake it, when you can do it for real? . The cameraman Dion Beebe gets a maximum chromatic saturation. The shooting in these places like Ciudad del Este is incredibly stimulating and exciting.It's a Tri-border area where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet. It's such a unique part of the world. This town have people who are from Middle East, Lebanese and Syrians, a lot of ethnic Chinese and the country speaks Guarani, which is the indigenous language. These people were extras and director got to be pretty determined to get a crew to these places. Also was shot a lot of stuff in the Dominican Republic and in some areas, it took a lot of social engineering to be able to bring a film company in and shoot responsibly and shoot safely. The main shooting is Miami, it's kind of globalized city with a huge population and a lot of money, and lot of people from Haiti, Brazil, Venezuela Columbia. In the movie Miami seems to have elevated itself, up into the most sensual which is up into the air.It's reflected the storm systems, the clouds, the dramatic weather and nature in a very, almost tactile way. Filming in really swank, fantastic places, and the girls are still beautiful(Gong Li, Naomie Harris,Elizabeth Rodriguez) and the cars are still fast but doesn't pull any punches when it comes to the underbelly of Miami.The city is photographed with alluring, it's very attractive, very engaging , sensual and also very dangerous and things that we can see around the images; furthermore an atmospheric music score by John Murphy. The motion picture is well realized by the successful director Michael Mann.

• Cop thriller for adults

  General_Cromwell2006-08-11

  While this is called 'Miami Vice' and has the same names as the characters from the TV show, thats where the similarities end. This is a no nonsense undercover cop thriller. There are no 'buddy cops', wisecracks, car chases, or O.T.T action, so the casual movie goer is going to be a little bemused by what they are seeing. But fans of Michael Mann's work will be in seventh heaven, because this has all the director's trademarks. There's some stunning camera-work (A lot of it digital), and some beautifully rendered sequences in this and some explosive action (But don't go expecting 'Lethal weapon' style action.) The trailer park stand off with the white supremacists was my favourite scene and an abject lesson in how to put suspense on screen. Performances are all very good, right down to the smaller parts and the plot demands attention. I found the films running time flew by. Its so refreshing to see a cop thriller for adults, with no silliness and one that doesn't insult the audiences intelligence. Best film so far this year.