Miami Vice
2006
Starring: Jamie Fox, Colin Farrell, Li Gong, John Ortiz, John Hawkes, Ciaran Hinds, Naomie Harris
Director: Michael Mann
Runtime: 134 Minutes
Distributor: Universal
Rating: R
In the hands of virtually any other director, this would be a guaranteed unmitigated disaster. A big budget remake of a hugely popular eighties television show that had essentially already been remade into the Bad Boys movies. But hope springs eternal whenever Michael Mann steps behind the camera and the last time he had a pop at remaking television, he had Pacino and De Niro share a cup of coffee amidst one of the greatest cops and robbers films of all time. Here he turns his attentions to Florida drug running. Undercover cops Tubbs and Crockett (Fox and Farrell), along with their DEA unit suddenly find themselves drafted into a compromised federal investigation of a dangerous Columbian cartel. As the only people left whose cover is not blown, they infiltrate the network, but quickly discover that getting in is a lot easier than getting out again.
Examine his work and one thing is clear above all else – Michael Mann loves cities, just loves them. Never before has a director gone to such great lengths to make a skyline of bloated sky scrapers and ugly high rises look like Monet could have painted it. The blinking lights, the lure of the streets at night, the gentle hum of the neon are this director’s paradise and here he is in good form. Miami Vice looks spectacular; crisp, clean visuals blanketed in diffused neon and bathed in the soft warm glow of the street lamp. The fact that Crockett and Isabelle take a speedboat to Cuba and go dancing is less of a plot point and more of an excuse for Mann to hop in a helicopter and majestically track Crockett’s approach to the Miami harbor on his way back.
Another plus is that Mann is also certainly not interested in simply remaking Heat in Miami. This is about as different film as you are likely to find. Where as Heat was all about character, here the characters are almost irrelevant. This is a film all about mood and all about style. Mann’s Miami is populated with some of the best-looking, best-dressed drug dealers in the world. Drug dealers who look as if they are moonlighting from their day job as Armani models. In this world, if you want to score large quantities of Columbian H, then you should head towards the nearest bank of neon lights you see until you find yourself inside a swanky Latin nightclub. Bad guys here, when they are not engaged in vicious acts of violence, basically wander around softly lit million dollar beach front condos making exposition laced phone calls for the benefit of the viewer. You quickly lose count of the number of times in the film a character begins a chunk of dialog with “this is how it’s going to go down.”
You can understand what Mann is trying to do with Tubbs and Crockett’s precarious situation. When you are in this deep there is simply nothing but business going on. These guys don’t have friends, they don’t have hobbies, they don’t talk about their feelings in ways a character placed in conflict in a narrative film is typically obliged to. Unfortunately, try as he might to fight with his minimalist procedural approach, this is a narrative film and as such it is sorely lacking in any kind of emotional resonance. There are skirted attempts to allude to an unspoken bond between Tubbs and Crockett that goes beyond the deepest professional respect and trust that they clearly share, but this is fleeting. The few moments of emotional punch seem to come out of a dutiful sense of necessity on Mann’s part, rather than a genuine attempt to embellish his characters within the world of the story. Miami vice and its polished story is doubtless as cool as ice, but like ice it is also cold and difficult to penetrate without shattering it into little pieces.
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