MIAMI VICE

Michael Mann’s vivid and chromatic crime drama Miami Vice is the groundbreaking tv cop show processed through a post-9/11 digital zeitgeist to capture the capricious, dangerous, and bloody world of undercover police operations. Lose all thoughts of a slice of ’80s cheese served up for mindless thrills and laughs. This film crackles with edgy, haunting power, and offers no ‘idiot’s guide to police procedurals’ to nurture the audience. There are no main titles or narrative devices to orient ourselves; we are just dropped, pink and squalling, into the world of a team of undercover Miami police officers led by Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Rico Tubbs (Jamie Foxx, in his second film for Mann after the superb Collateral) and left to figure it all out from the inside, encouraged to become amateur anthropologists in a study of the language and ritual of a different, hazardous, and unpredictable world.

Crockett and Tubbs are drawn into an operation to get inside a drug ring operated by Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar) and in the process plug a leak that has gotten two FBI agents killed. Going deep undercover as transportation specialists, the trail leads the cops to Montoya’s aide José Yero (John Ortiz) and his business manager Isabella (Gong Li), with whom Crockett begins an affair that blurs the boundaries between his real and imagined identities.

Vivacious and pumping with life, Miami Vice is the work of a master visual stylist. Mann shoots the film in a dazzling digital neo-noir style, alternating shadows and grain with cool, vivid colours, and injecting fast bursts of unexpected, brutal violence. No over the top heroics here; the cops move with an economy of action that is convincing, the result apparently of the actors going through actual training scenarios with undercover police officers. The film is shot with digital cameras, which affords occasional grain, especially in the night time shots, and lends a subtle verisimilitude. An order of magnitude more violent than the source material, the violence is not lingered upon, but fires out in staccato bursts that knock the viewer off balance. Dialogue is crisp, fast, and cool-noir; characterizations are shallow but brisk and efficient; and the film worms its way to a surprising emotional core.

Though not at the level of Mann’s masterwork Heat, Miami Vice is an absorbing shot of adult-themed crime thriller. And, like most of Mann’s movies, it has an absolutely killer soundtrack.

Cool quote:
"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."

I may use that one on the next troublemaker at a meeting.

---
Written and Directed by Michael Mann

Starring:

Colin Farrell....Det. James 'Sonny' Crockett
Jamie Foxx....Det. Ricardo 'Rico' Tubbs
Li Gong....Isabella (as Gong Li)
Naomie Harris....Det. Trudy Joplin
Ciarán Hinds....FBI Agent Fujima
Justin Theroux....Det. Larry Zito
Luis Tosar....Arcángel de Jesús Montoya
Barry Shabaka Henley....Lt. Martin Castillo
John Ortiz....José Yero
Elizabeth Rodriguez....Det. Gina Calabrese