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Miami Vice July 30, 3006 |
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After seeing Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice” I can honestly say that I plan on changing my career path and enlisting in the Miami-Dade county police academy as soon as possible, because if it’s as cool as it looks in the movies, than I should be in hog heaven for the next thirty-five years. Of course, I’m going to read the fine print before signing on the dotted line, because if there’s a stipulation that says in no particular way does a recruit have the right to drive a Ferrari at 150, speed across the Keys in a Go-Fast boat without a care in the world, wear his longish, stylish hair and five-days stubble like a Colin Farrell wannabe, destroy the South Beach club scene with the hottest of babes, and the coolest of compadres, and partake in international drug smuggling rings that end in full out gun blazes with Colombian cartel chiefs and the Aryan brotherhood, than they might have the wrong sucker in their sights. No traffic stops and beach foot patrol for this Crockett-in-training, if I can’t have the cars, boats, clubs, beautiful girls, and hot soundtrack that comes with the territory of being a Miami Vice copper, than I’ll just have to give up the dream and keep living vicariously through the movies, where tales of undercover cops and high stakes drug smuggling rings, cut to the tune of techno beats, Linkin Park, and Audioslave, is about as adrenalized as it gets. Sadly, that rush of adrenaline only lasts so far, and what you get with all of the gun battles, nightclubs, fast cars, and great music is a movie that has style to spare, and the ability to make you envy the fast lifestyles of it’s too-cool heroes, but has no emotional core, making it hard to appreciate the extraordinary situations the characters go through, when all you care about is the situations, and not the characters. This is a painstakingly well made action film, but brilliant nightscapes and endless gun fights can only carry you as far as your lead characters remain interesting, and Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs haven’t been interesting since 1986, and there’s no indication with this adaptation of the old NBC show that they’ll get interesting any time soon. Michael Mann is a visual perfectionist, and he and his talented cinematographer Dion Beebe create a stunning nighttime landscape out of Miami and Latin America filled with deep dark blues and purples, but Mann’s screenplay isn’t strong enough on characterization or plot cohesion to totally meld with the brilliant visuals. Colin Farrell and Mann regular Jamie Foxx star as Vice detectives Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs, two hot-shot studs who we see busting a nightclub pornography racket in the film’s opening scenes, when they get a call from an informant, a deal between an undercover FBI team and an Aryan drug cartel has gone bad, and all intel has been rendered useless. This brings the feds to our heroes, who are undercover specialists and can seamlessly blend in with the Colombian cartel of Arcangel de Jesus Montoya (Luis Tosar), and his chief lieutenant Jose Yero (John Ortiz), to establish a trafficking run between Miami and certain Latin American countries worth millions of dollars, and better yet, priceless evidence to take down both the Aryans and the Colombians, who are responsible for the deaths of FBI undercover agents. The plot is vast and moves along too quickly to fully grasp the motivations for some high intensity standoffs between the boys and their targets, often leaving you scratching your head as to why such serious, melodramatic stuff is given so little exposition and explanation (Mann makes no bones about jumping from one important scene to another with no time to chew on the ramifications of the former scene), and when Crockett seemingly falls in love with the female leader of the cartel (China’s gorgeous superstar Gong Li), the affair is so quick and underwritten the dangerousness and tenderness of it is hard to fully grasp. Tubbs has a woman too, and when she gets kidnapped it leads to an exciting, nightmarish raid on a trailer park, but theirs is a mysterious love affair as well, given time enough for one or two steamy sex scenes before the boys get back to business, and one more confounding deal is set in place to keep the film humming at a disturbingly frustrating pace. With “Miami Vice” Michael Mann is taking more cues from “Heat” than he is from the more controlled, existential character driven story line of “Collateral”, his superior Jamie Foxx, Tom Cruise drama from ’04, and because of it ‘Vice’ feels even more over the top than “Heat”, but for anybody who has seen that ’95 action masterwork, that’s a kind of backhanded compliment, because to out gun “Heat” in the outrageousness factor is a notch on the belt, but to fail to equal its sprawling character development and expansive plot details is a giant step back. There’s nothing wrong with the filmmaking on display here, Mann is a master of this kind of action, and his nighttime cityscapes and incredibly dark and dazzling nightclub scenes (reminiscent of the shootout in “Collateral”) are the main reason to see the film, but I can’t help but feel like the film has an emptiness about it where more characterization, and frankly, better acting could have filled the void. The characters are broad generalizations of characters we’ve seen a thousand times before, and only Gong Li (who is light years away from “Raise the Red Lantern”) receives our sympathy over the way she is played around with by both Crockett and her controlling bosses, but even she seems out of place in the film’s macho understanding of drug trafficking and undercover police operations, where relationships, let alone true love, sticks out like a fat man in a Speedo. All of this may be pleasing to the escapist area of the brain (who doesn’t want to fast boat from Miami to Havana at 100 MPH with Gong Li at your side?), and because Michael Mann is such a visual craftsman, the film is always fun to watch, but it’s hardly a profound meditation on the dangers of cop life, and for that, “Miami Vice” is just another action flick with no message, no depth, and nothing new to offer. “Miami Vice” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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