Miami Vice

I watched Michael Mann’s Miami Vice and then went home to watch Wong Kar Wai’s 1991 Days of Being Wild. The films of both directors are infused with intense atmosphere. While for Wong atmosphere more often than not is contained within closed spaces, such as rooms and apartments, Mann chooses sprawling cityscapes. Both directors explore the interactions of their characters within and against these settings. While in Wong the result can be a liberating claustrophobia, in Mann the result is a kind of agoraphobic entrapment, where the horizon, ground, and sky gradually close in.

Miami Vice is an entertaining film and in every way superior to the television series. There was a mannered and vacuous superficiality to the television show. I never managed to sit through an episode, though what I did see of the show made me wonder whether the two main actors were sampling the narcotics of the smugglers they sought to capture. The effect was of an over-long rock video, shiny, soporific, and deadening.

Unlike many films based on television shows, this one does not depend on its source. It is so unlike the show that you hardly think of it. The fact that Mann directed both the TV series and the film makes this all the more remarkable and certainly gives him the authority to make the considerable changes that he makes. He shows no particular reverence or respect for the source. He takes the scenario of two undercover officers on the Miami vice squad and completely reinvents it. One review I read suggested that this film expected viewers to have the television series in mind as they watched, and that the shock they experience as they encounter the disjuncture between TV show and film become part of the text of the film. This may be so, but the film works entirely well on its own.

Cinematography is a major element in Miami Vice, as it is in most Mann films. But in this one Miami is filmed in washed out colors, as if to remove any semblance of glitz and glamour.

Miami Vice the film is always interesting but often only casually so. Tension doesn’t begin to build until the final confrontation between cops and smugglers, and then the film really takes fire. But it takes an hour and forty-five minutes to get there. Jaime Foxx as Tubbs seems often merely to be reading his lines, and though he is effective enough in his role he’s not committed to it with much passion (certainly not with the passion and accuracy we saw in Ray or even in Collateral). Colin Farrell as Crockett often seems unfocused if not constipated, but he too carries out his role well enough. Both are preferable to, and more effective than, the originals.

In this film, the Russian Mafia, Aryan Nation, and drug lords from various South American nations conspire as the villains, and they are formidable if mechanical. Why do movie villains often seem more intelligent, evil, and technologically savvy than they are in reality?

In the end, Crockett and Tubbs survive and leave room for a sequel, if Mann is foolish enough to undertake one. Not as sharp as Collateral or as operatically full as Heat, Miami Vice is still a successful effort by one of the better commercial directors at work today.