Miami Vice: Movie, DVD, HD DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2005)

The first sign that the new Michael Mann movie, "Miami Vice," is going to remove itself from Mann's own popular, 1980s television show, is the moment Colin Farrell slides onscreen sporting a blowout mullet and a blunted Fu Manchu.

Whereas a good deal of the television show became a harbinger for the horrors of what was fashionable during the day--it championed such things a the skinny neck tie, the geri curl, the white shoe and the pastel suit--there is nothing in Farrell's tangled bird's nest of a 'do that suggests that mousse, let alone shampoo, has been applied in days. (The product RID, on the other hand, is a definite possibility.)

This rough-and-tumble version of "Vice," which Mann based on his own script, never finds a story that competes with Miami itself.

At night or at sunset, on the water or along the city's neon corridors, Mann's Miami looks at once hot and cool, dangerous and seductive--just as it should be. Those same qualities should apply to the story, and while they occasionally do, it's only when the characters connect, which they do in just one relationship--and not the one you expect.

It isn't vice cops Sonny Crockett (Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx, barely registering) who have the chemistry here--these two actors are so detached, some will wonder whether they even were introduced before principal filming began. Instead, it's the relationship that builds between Crockett and the mysterious Isabella (the terrific Gong Li) that gives the movie the soul it otherwise would have lacked.

The story that draws them together is a convoluted pastiche of drug cartel cliches we've seen time and again in better movies and television shows. Crockett and Tubbs find themselves investigating a South American drug kingpin routinely shipping drugs into Miami. They go undercover, working the angles as they slip into this peculiar world of oily toughs. Eventually, Crockett meets Isabella, a gorgeous money launderer who not only works for the drug kingpin, but who also is in a shaky relationship with him.

What she finds in Crockett is pure heat. So, naturally, fireworks and bullets ensue.

What's peculiar about "Miami Vice" is how the movie refuses to fetishize the Ferrari Crocket and Tubbs drive, the expensive speedboats they race, the swank locales they visit, the bling that's part of their job. That was a core element of the television show, the reason so many watched, but here, it's as if the sub-culture doesn't exist, which is hardly true, particularly for Miami, where it continues to thrive.

More pressing is the reason the movie exists. If Mann was determined to ditch the kitsch of his television show and make a serious film, the natural conclusion is that he did so to offer new insights into the current drug culture.

So, what is it? What does he have to share that we haven't seen before? Turns out it isn't much. While the movie does feature a fine shootout here, a swell romance there, and lives are repeatedly put on the line, throughout "Miami Vice," there's the sense that Mann became bored with the ideas that propelled his television show onto the screen, and thus his film into theaters.

After seeing it, you might see why.

Grade: C