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Miami Vice (2006) Director: Michael Mann Cast: Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx Time: 134 min. Rating: |
Any time a movie is based on a TV show, you should prepare yourself for some mindless entertainment. Occasionally, you’ll be surprised to find the film is fairly decent. However, in the case of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, this movie is so bad I couldn’t even sit through the first hour.
The overly cliché story opens with Crockett (Farrell), Tubbs (Foxx), and their team of detectives on some unexplained assignment in a nightclub, when they receive a phone call from an ex-informant caught up in an FBI plot gone bad. Crockett and Tubbs agree to work for the feds, going undercover to bust some drug dealer from South America.
The story shifts briefly to Haiti for the initial meeting with one of the dealer’s lieutenants, and it moves back to Miami for the initial drug run as they gain the dealer’s confidence and slowly infiltrate his gang. And even though I didn’t watch much beyond this point, you can tell exactly where the story is headed—they set the dealer up, raid his operation, and have a big showdown.
The clichéd plot isn’t the most annoying thing about this movie; it’s based on the TV show, so it’s naturally going to follow the basic TV episode plot. It’s everything hung onto this story that is so annoying.
Mann makes no attempt to develop his characters. He works on the assumption you’ve seen the TV show, so you don’t need to know anything about Crockett and Tubbs. He is so confident in this that he doesn’t even bother to identify which is which until 10 minutes into the film. But you don’t really need to know who they are because they are simply one-dimensional beings that spout nonsense lines.
The dialogue is probably the most infuriating thing about Miami Vice. Crockett and Tubbs speak in techno-crime-slang filtered through an MBA matrix. The effect is like listening to Scarface talk about paradigm shifts. One of the characters actually uses the phrase “vertically integrated” when talking the drug dealer’s operation. With all of the jargon, the dialog is completely unintelligible.
But thanks to the undercover-cop genre clichés, you don’t really need to understand the words to figure out what’s happening. A drug run looks like drug run. A raid on a drop looks like a raid on a drop. A high-profile meeting with the drug dealers looks and plays exactly as it should.
Another irritating problem is that for an action film, absolutely nothing happens. The characters move about the screen, but they don’t really seem to accomplish much, and the movie is totally devoid of suspense or dramatic tension. It completely lacks any adrenaline rush. Even the “exciting” boat race that serves as the opening sequence is bland and boring, and it could’ve used some serious editing.
If the actors had at least put something into their roles, maybe this movie would’ve been a little more watchable, but they just spew their lines and follow the script without bothering to show any emotion or interest in what they’re doing. Clearly, Farrell and Foxx were just collecting their paychecks and enjoying the party scene in Miami.
It’s a struggle to find anything worthwhile in Miami Vice. Perhaps the views of Miami in the background are pleasing, but you can see better, more artistic views of Miami in CSI: Miami, which is shorter, better acted, better produced, better filmed, less clichéd, and free. And CSI is a contemporary TV show, not a throwback to the lame 1980s, a true dead zone in American pop culture.
Sitting through Miami Vice is sitting in the humidity of the Everglades on an August afternoon—it’s tedious, unending, and thoroughly oppressive. Michael Mann and everyone else responsible for this movie should be arrested for insult with a mindless weapon.
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