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Miami Vice (2006 - Michael Mann)
When Michael Mann executive produced "Miami Vice" back in the 1980s, it was a hip, stylish and different take on the television cop show. While those specific elements are all dated now - especially the style, I suppose there was a slim chance the basic concept could be newly updated for a post-9/11 world and given a big screen boost. Whatever the odds were going in, the resulting movie crapped out on the first roll of the dice.
Moviestars Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx are now Miami detectives Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, but there's absolutely nothing to distinguish them as characters. They are stock types, and nothing more. If the leads are just types you can guess how uncreative and unambitious the rest of the film is. At two and a half hours long, you'd think they'd be able to do something with the romantic relationships other than just tack them on as shallow subplots and go through the motions, but that's exactly what happens. Foxx and Naomie Harris are supposedly a couple, but apart from their obligitory sex scene, when he risks everything to save her near the end of the picture we just have to take his word that it means something to him, because it certainly isn't up on the screen. Even worse is Farrell and Chinese star Li Gong (To Live, Shanghai Triad, 2046), who supposedly fall madly in love with each other while he's deep undercover. I know the events in the plot that prove this, but there is zero chemistry between them and absolutely no sense of emotional involvement.
There's also no sense of visual style or place in this flick, which is puzzling. Mann can do both very well, as evidenced in his previous flick Collateral (2004). For all its contrivances, that movie had style to spare and painted an interesting picture of Los Angeles after dark. There is nothing of the kind in Miami Vice. And if you're going into this thing to enjoy a big, dumb action movie, know this: until the last twenty minutes, there's almost no gunplay of any kind. There is a big, climactic shootout, but frankly there aren't six frames of it that can touch what Mann did during the bank heist gone wrong that is at the center of his Heat (1995). In that movie and especially that sequence you got the feel for what being in firefight with large calibur automatic weapons in the middle of a city must be like. For the finale of Miami Vice we actually take a few giant steps backward and have more of a standard "A-Team" level shoot-em-up with little sense of the physical geography of where this is going down and a cartoonish sense of what a bullet does to flesh and steel. Though I should be careful in using the word cartoonish: that makes it seem as if this might be fun. It isn't.
What's left before the shooting is a drawn out dull procedural with no surprises and no wit, populated with cardboard characters, absent any real style or sense of place, no fun, no action, with nothing new to add to the genre while simply going through the motions (slowly going through the motions). It may be a step and a half up from Bad Boys II (2003), but it's about twenty-three steps below Heat (1995).
GRADE: D
Miami Vice (2006 - Michael Mann)
When Michael Mann executive produced "Miami Vice" back in the 1980s, it was a hip, stylish and different take on the television cop show. While those specific elements are all dated now - especially the style, I suppose there was a slim chance the basic concept could be newly updated for a post-9/11 world and given a big screen boost. Whatever the odds were going in, the resulting movie crapped out on the first roll of the dice.
Moviestars Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx are now Miami detectives Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, but there's absolutely nothing to distinguish them as characters. They are stock types, and nothing more. If the leads are just types you can guess how uncreative and unambitious the rest of the film is. At two and a half hours long, you'd think they'd be able to do something with the romantic relationships other than just tack them on as shallow subplots and go through the motions, but that's exactly what happens. Foxx and Naomie Harris are supposedly a couple, but apart from their obligitory sex scene, when he risks everything to save her near the end of the picture we just have to take his word that it means something to him, because it certainly isn't up on the screen. Even worse is Farrell and Chinese star Li Gong (To Live, Shanghai Triad, 2046), who supposedly fall madly in love with each other while he's deep undercover. I know the events in the plot that prove this, but there is zero chemistry between them and absolutely no sense of emotional involvement.
There's also no sense of visual style or place in this flick, which is puzzling. Mann can do both very well, as evidenced in his previous flick Collateral (2004). For all its contrivances, that movie had style to spare and painted an interesting picture of Los Angeles after dark. There is nothing of the kind in Miami Vice. And if you're going into this thing to enjoy a big, dumb action movie, know this: until the last twenty minutes, there's almost no gunplay of any kind. There is a big, climactic shootout, but frankly there aren't six frames of it that can touch what Mann did during the bank heist gone wrong that is at the center of his Heat (1995). In that movie and especially that sequence you got the feel for what being in firefight with large calibur automatic weapons in the middle of a city must be like. For the finale of Miami Vice we actually take a few giant steps backward and have more of a standard "A-Team" level shoot-em-up with little sense of the physical geography of where this is going down and a cartoonish sense of what a bullet does to flesh and steel. Though I should be careful in using the word cartoonish: that makes it seem as if this might be fun. It isn't.
What's left before the shooting is a drawn out dull procedural with no surprises and no wit, populated with cardboard characters, absent any real style or sense of place, no fun, no action, with nothing new to add to the genre while simply going through the motions (slowly going through the motions). It may be a step and a half up from Bad Boys II (2003), but it's about twenty-three steps below Heat (1995).
GRADE: D