Miami Vice, for me, has many happy nostalgic connotations. Not the same ones everyone else has: I was too young to get it when it was actually on the air and thus only saw the one episode where the kid jai alai player got in deep shit and let the ball kill him at the end. No, my happy nostalgic Miami Vice memories date from this couple months back in like 2005 or something when the short-lived Sleuth channel had this uncanny ability to air Miami Vice reruns at the exact time I needed them. It was thus that I became an enormous, near cultish fan of the show. So, rather than it being Miami Vice that made me enjoy Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, it was vice (city) versa.
For a show that is considered so inextricable from the time and place it first aired, Miami Vice holds up surprisingly well (the first 2+ seasons, anyway). In many ways, it was rather ahead of its time, as a TV show that utilized any but the most cursory cinematic technique in storytelling.
As absurd as he became by the end of the show (like whenever the hell it was when that episode with James Brown and the UFO was shat out onto the screen) Don Johnson was fucking awesome at the outset. Sonny Crockett, once upon a time, was a god among men. Don't let's get cause and effect get muddled viz a vis those ridiculous pastel outfits—Sonny Crockett was so fucking cool he could wear that stuff and still be gangsta.
And, as thoroughly as his subsequent career did not exist, Philip Michael Thomas was pretty fuckin badass as Tubbs (and a much better dresser than Crockett). There's a mistaken impression of Tubbs as being a dork because he didn't get laid as often as Crockett and wasn't as blasé about shit, but both of those comparisons are unfair, because nobody got laid as often as Crockett, and the blasé act was an act, Crockett got just as bent of shape about shit as Tubbs, he just hid it better, being a WASP. That's how we do. We are to repression what the French are to wine. Even barring these important distinctions, Philip Michael Thomas would get a lifetime pass simply for the way he said “Calderone.” Certain voices are just meant to say certain words.Just as important as the terrific lead performances and the clothes was the music. Jan Hammer's theme, and the credit montage with all the pelicans and shit and that building in Miami with the hole in the middle, was iconic (and charted, impressively). Coming as it did in the early years of MTV (and being, as it was, originally pitched as a cop show with an MTV aesthetic), it also featured a number of pop records as a song score. This led to the perplexing situation wherein Phil Collins and Glenn Frey songs actually have positive connotations for me (“In The Air Tonight” will always be the “rolling up to the shootout” song, not the "Tom Cruise hooking up with Rebecca De Mornay on the El" song) for which I hold Miami Vice to be even more awesome.
So, with all this being said, one would think that when I read that Michael Mann was making a movie version with Colin Farrell as Crockett and Jamie Foxx as Tubbs, that my knee-jerk reaction would be “oh, blasphemy.” Well, not so fast there, knee jerker. Michael Mann, despite being responsible for such atomic turds as Public Enemies and Ali, has earned lifetime, unswerveable trust for Heat. Heat was so fucking good Michael Mann could direct a romantic comedy with Dane Cook and Sarah Jessica Parker and I'd go see it.
And, let's not forget, Michael Mann was the showrunner for Miami Vice, and in TV, the showrunner is the auteur. Michael Mann deciding to make a movie about Miami Vice is not some fuckface evil white guy in a suit at some studio being like, “Hurr hurr, let's get paid.” Michael Mann deciding to make a movie about Miami Vice clearly means he's like, “Let's see what Miami Vice means in the modern era, now that a lot of the trends that were beginning in the 80s, such as Miami being the portal between North and South America and a major business hub, have played out.”
Still, you might counter with the argument, “But why do you have to call the movie Miami Vice, since 'Miami Vice' is so inextricably linked to the clothes, the music, and the 80s? Why not just do a new movie about early 21st century Miami?” To that, I riposte: “The comparison of time and place through the eyes of the same characters makes a valuable statement about the differences wrought by two decades of changes in South Florida, and the separate iterations of the character thus have a symbiotic relationship with the setting. NOW GO HOME AND GET YOUR FUCKIN SHINEBOX.”
The movie as shown in theaters is a radically different entity than the one available on home video, and it is so with relatively few changes. Apparently as the result of a panicked eleventh-hour re-edit by Michael Mann right before release, the theatrical version starts by tossing the audience in the deep end of the pool. We open getting smacked in the face by loud music and a tumultuous night out in an exclusive Miami club. We're forced to figure out on our own that these random people in these closeups (is that Colin Farrell in that hideous ponytail? Man, Jamie Foxx looks constipated . . .) are cops running a sting operation on Isaach de Bankole. This sparse approach to exposition in the opener leads to the experience of the rest of the movie as being disorienting, loud, and short on help figuring out what the fuck's going on.
Now, the DVD version, with the only major change being an opening scene where Crockett and Tubbs are racing a fast boat and Herc (sorry, Domenick Lombardozzi, you'll always be Herc, even though you're supposed to be Switek here) is revealed to be undercover trying to crack a prostitution ring, has a completely different feel, and it's entirely because of the tone established by the opener. Even those two lines about sending Herc to go shtup some high-end hookers for God and country, so small a thing, makes the entire rest of the movie more coherent. The rest of the movie is just as short on expository hand-holding as it was before, but it all makes more sense (and I don't say that because I'd already seen it).
So Herc goes in to fuck a couple of Isaach de Bankole's hoes. Suddenly, Crockett and Tubbs are called away by an informant in trouble, and so they have to abort the sting. It turns out the informant has run afoul of some white supremacist meth dealers, who've murdered his family, and when Tubbs informs him of this (with brow-furrowing sincerity on the part of Mr. Foxx) the informant wanders out into traffic and is no more.
Crockett and Tubbs, worried that their cover is blown (the call from the informant wasn't secure), are introduced by Castillo to Special Agent Ciaran Hinds of the FBI (in an interesting scene, since the actor playing Castillo in this is clearly not Hispanic, and Ciaran Hinds' character has a Japanese name; fortunately, repeat viewings enabled me to gloss over this aberration) who works out an arrangement to send Crockett and Tubbs undercover to get next to uberbaddie Jose Yero.
In short order, after Crockett and Tubbs establish their cover in characteristically ballsy and dangerous fashion, they're summoned to Port au Prince for a meeting with the illustrious Mr. Yero, where they find that in spite of his massive wealth and power from the drugs and arms trades, he is merely a middleman for a real uberbaddie named the Archangel, who's so fucking badass he has sex with Gong Li.
Oh yeah, that's right, Gong Li is in this. See what I mean about not doubting Michael Mann? For me, as erotically fascinating as I find repressed women, you can imagine the effect Gong Li had on me as a young teenager in Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern. Her relatively thankless role as the Archangel's financial adviser/mistress achieves depth the second Michael Mann points the camera at her, because she's Gong Li and that's the way things are.
Crockett and Tubbs go to work for the Archangel, dealing with Yero. A lot of cool sequences involving fast boats and fancy flying to avoid radar detection ensue. And Crockett—in a nod to the original series—epically trips on his dick by taking up with Gong Li. The good news is, all of us who've been crushing on her since the early 90s get to see her naked in the shower scene. The bad news is . . . Jose Yero finds out and suddenly develops homicidal intent toward Crockett and Tubbs, and starts poking around their cover ID's. Which, naturally, start showing some cracks.
It turns out that Jose Yero does business with the skinheads who fucked over Tubbs' informant at the beginning, and they further fuck with Tubbs by abducting his girlfriend, fellow cop Trudy. Our heroes, in a classic Michael Mann sequence, bust in to the trailer park where she's being held hostage and very concisely and thoroughly kick ass, but not without talkin' a little trash:
Skinhead: [Holding detonator] Shoot me, she dies. Shoot me, go ahead. Fuck it, we can all go. That's cool.But, wouldn't ya know, right when they think they've got Trudy out all safe and sound, another bomb goes off and she's in ICU. That's what makes that sequence so brilliant, that it kicks you in the balls like that.
Gina (the Saundra Santiago character): That's not what happens. What will happen is... what will happen is I will put a round at twenty-seven hundred feet per second into the medulla at the base of your brain. And you will be dead from the neck down before your body knows it. Your finger won't even twitch. Only you get dead. So tell me, sport, do you believe that?
Skinhead: Hey, fu—
[Gina shoots him through the head; nice pink mist squib]
Naturally, Tubbs is now on the warpath. Jose Yero's gonna get fucked. In another nice nod to the original series, Crockett and Tubbs roll up to the climactic shootout with “In The Air Tonight” playing, though sadly it's a lame “metal” cover, not Phil. (Goddammit, why does Miami Vice make me like Phil Collins? MUST EXTERMINATE!) And they have the shootout, which is the moment when I fell head over heels for Michael Mann as a director, all over again for like the 90th time. This time, the reason was that I suddenly realized that he uses gunshot sound effects AS CHARACTER REVELATION. I know, that's deep, I'll explain. In Heat, the gunshots are loud, but very matter of fact—guns are a tool Bobbert and Val Kilmer and Danny Trejo and Tom Sizemore et al use as part of business, but it's just business. In Collateral, Tom Cruise's gun is fuckin LOUD and fuckin vividly metallic, to highlight Jamie Foxx's alarm and confusion that his fare is a sociopathic hitman. In Miami Vice . . . the gunshots are muted because Crockett and Tubbs have been undercover so long that the whole world is muted, everything is gray, metaphorically speaking (see also the DV cinematography, very muted, very post-hurricane green at night).
So yeah, sound geek nerdgasm, massive shootout, not the best shootout ever, but it's still cool. The way Jamie Foxx comes out of a somersault to blow Jose Yero's abdomen all over the side of the freighter with his shotgun is fairly badass, though the effect is lessened slightly by how awkward Jamie Foxx looks doing it (you can't help but wonder why some skinhead didn't blow him to kingdom come first).
The picture concludes with Crockett looking the other way while Gong Li gets the fuck out of Dodge, and the discovery that the Archangel has vanished into thin air (gotta think about that sequel, ya know). Oh, and Trudy's okay. Roll credits.
There isn't really 140 minutes of plot in Miami Vice, but then again, this is Michael Mann. He likes to let the camera linger, let his actors take their time getting that dialogue out, and so forth. His saving grace is that he's Michael Mann; that kind of leisurely mise en scene is insufferable in someone with smaller balls.
Colin Farrell does damn fine work as Crockett. It's fashionable to hate on Colin Farrell, but it's not his fault his pictures lose money, and there's a limit to the degree his off-camera debauches should color one's opinion of his work. The work is always fairly solid, though he's been known to come up with some fairly ridiculous, never-before-seen-in-nature American accents if his dialect coach slacks off. This time, though, he's all right; he only sounds like he needs to clear his throat.
Jamie Foxx is a little ridiculous as Tubbs, mostly because his “serious” acting style, when he doesn't have a mannered Ray Charles impersonation to hide behind, consists of frowning and whispering a lot. It sounds bizarre to say that an Academy Award winner's performance suffers in comparison to Philip Michael Thomas', but hey . . . Jamie Foxx doesn't have that PMT je ne sais quois.
In the end, the movie version of Miami Vice is a really well shot cop movie, just like the TV version was a really well shot cop show. That the movie values guns and flashy vehicles over fashion and music is a sign of the times, partially because the fashion and music distracted from the fact that the show was a rock-solid cop show. Absolutely everybody did a cameo appearance (Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, Pam Grier, Dennis Farina, Wesley Snipes, Stanley Tucci, Willie Nelson, Ian McShane, Luis Guzman, Chris Rock, Richard Belzer, G. Gordon Liddy, Bernard King, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, etc etc ad infinitum).
The movie never reaches the heights the show, at its peak, achieved. It is, however, a thoroughly enjoyable cop picture, and some of the tunes (with the exception of the crappy “In The Air Tonight” cover) are excellent, and, in the case of that Jay-Z/Linkin Park track that's playing in the opening nighclub scene, achieve the same “why the fuck are these sadistic bastards making me like a song by these shitheads (that's directed at Linkin Park, not Hova)?” effect as the Phil Collins/Glenn Frey trolling on the series. At the absolute worst, it's a DVD I can throw on and spend two and a half hours being entertained. And hey, Manohla Dargis agrees with me about how dope this movie is. AND what, motherfucker?
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