Michael Mann: Miami Vice (2006)
M I A M I .. V I C E
Property values high, entertainment value low
Everybody likes cops and robbers stories. They're more fun when cops go undercover and pretend to be bad guys because bad is, let's face it, just cooler than good. Undercover, things become more teasing, subtler: more rich and complicated. We go over to the dark side, moral issues become more troubling and personal. We may not want to come back; the cops themselves, believably, may not want to. The line is never really clear anyway, as bad-cop movies like Antoine Fuqua's Training Day or Joe Carnahan's Narc illustrate. Michael Mann's new movie version of the influential Eighties salt-and-pepper cop team TV series he once produced goes deep into darkness -- but it's never quite the right kind. Mann's version is much more serious than the series, which, though it went to daring new places (for TV, that is) in its subjects, still had a casual, bright side, as symbolized by Crockett's white linen suits and white loafers and pink T-shirts. Unfortunately the movie Miami Vice is as murky and confusing as it is dark and solemn. And despite visual beauty, it lacks most of the touches that make a crime story good, like interesting characters, intense relationships, and surprising plot twists.
Where the Eighties Miami Vice pair of of Don Johnson as Sonny Crockett and Philip Michael Thomas as Ricardo Tubbs was casual and sporty, Colin Farrell as Crockett and Jamie Foxx as Tubbs are tough and scruffy, all work and no play, more intense, and, on Farrell's part, clearly less at ease. Farrell drops his Irish accent for a slightly indeterminate American one, and everything about him seems uncertain. He's never really fun to watch. Sadly, Foxx, who was so good in Ray and Mann's Collateral, though impressive to look at and fluent in spewing the techno-jargon this physically elaborate film revels in, isn't much fun to watch either. Though the story isn't any deeper than something on TV, the movie runs for two hours and twenty-six minutes and cost $125 million. That's a lot of wasted time and wasted money.
Though the gross outlines of plot are all too clear, the preponderance of authentically foreign-sounding Latino drug dealers and a Chinese dragon-lady moll (Gong Li) make for a lot of half-comprehensible sentences -- and dialogue that loses its rhythm -- and the minute-to-minute action is frequently foggy. The buddy aspect and any sense of human connectedness it might bring is the first casualty in a story littered with corpses. This Tubbs and Crockett never develop any discernable chemistry. They never get to play together (as in have fun, spend down time), or to play off each other. They go straight to work and aren't even together that much -- despite the fact that the strongest line in the piece, because it's delivered so well, is Tubbs' "I will never doubt you." Unfortunately, Farrell as Crockett projects non-stop doubt.
The camera obtrusively wanders off with the two men on separate love-fests. Tubbs gets his first in a blaxploitation-style bed-and-shower session with his squeeze Trudy (Naomi Harris) a female co-worker, as if to provide equal time, since Crockett's fling with Isabella (Ms. Gong) becomes a big deal, and the only real complication in the plot. Both sex sequences are so heavy-handedly, self-consciously sensuous they make you squirm.
As you'd expect in a film of epic cost, the cop caper has elaborate flourishes, long delays. Our boys are to impersonate drug dealers to replace a blown FBI operation's crew. Why this would work even for a while with drug lords so grand their underling has a crack intelligence-gathering team I never understood. All the drug shipments are epic in size too, involving billions, or at least many millions wholesale. Crockett and Tubbs begin by intercepting a big shipment locally so they can pretend to find it and give it back free to show their good faith. When they meet the drug kingpin, an oily, bespectacled chap who gives them a very hard time, he turns out to be only the gatekeeper for the big boy. We should have guessed: why, the little guy's condo only cost $4 million. Or was that another little guy? At that point I was wishing for subtitles.
Bad guy number one is a bearded, taller, slightly comatose codger in a nice car, with Gong Li by his side. She and Farrell exchange significant looks. When No. 1 utters the usual clichés, You'll never see me again after this, You'll become rich beyond your wildest dreams, etc., the camera pointedly shows us his and Gong Li's diamond-studded watches.
Is this all global drug deals -- and a $125 million budget -- get you, a leather-lined limo and $30,000 watches? No, of course not, if little guy's got a $4 million condo. There's more -- a big long castle on a mountain surrounded by spectacular waterfalls -- Xanadu, seen several times from the air (I assumed digitalized -- CGI has crimped the "wow" factor of such shots).
Gong Li is another casualty of this lovely disaster. She has been exquisite in films by Chen Kaige and Wong Kar Wai. She still has presence here, but she looks plain, flattened, cheapened. Her English voice, and her enunciation, leave much to be desired.
Despite heavy breathing in sex scenes and during edgy shootouts (slightly odd-sounding and puzzlingly similar in both, but each accompanied by appropriate music) there isn't much real tension, other than the moments leading up to the Western-style shootout at the end. Using DV with special processing gorgeously again, Mann is a painter with excessive tinted color, big skies, dazzling urban darkness, "throbbing nightclub set pieces." But he could have done so much better. He just did, in Collateral, where image and scenes were clear and the tension between self-deluding cabbie Foxx and slick sociopath hit man Cruise was subtle and interesting, and actually developed as we went along. This Miami binge was too elaborate a project, and every additional ten million spent was another step away from artistic clarity.
