Miami Vice

My co-worker was so angry you'd have thought someone keyed his vehicle or something.  No, he had seen 2006's MIAMI VICE over the weekend and felt cheated.  Cheated that writer/director/creator of the original series upon which this movie is based Michael Mann dared create something different, something that didn't satisfy his nostalgic yearnings.  "I mean, why call the movie 'Miami Vice' when it isn't AT ALL like the show?!" He was pissed, like he had really been wronged.  I found it amusing.  I had also seen the movie back during its original run and disagreed.  Disagreed that it was a bad movie, that is.  I did agree that Mann really came back with a new animal, one with some vague resemblances to that old show we stayed home for ('cause we couldn't even wait to watch it later on our VCRs) in the '80s.  As it was said, this was not your father's Miami Vice.

Same city, though times had changed.  Still infested with drugs and dangerous as hell.  Crockett and Tubbs are still the character names, but they act even more detached than the television counterparts.  Music narrates scenes, but instead of Glen Frey and Phil Collins we have Audioslave. Jan Hammer did not return to score.  The movie has highly stylized scenes, like the show, but here the style almost completely overwhelms narrative coherency.  As it was also said, this is "a one hundred million dollar art film."

I actually forgot about the plot during the early stretches.  Mainly,  Sonny Crockett (Colin Ferrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) pose as drug dealers in a cooperative with the Feds to take down a notorious kingpin known as Arcangel de Jesus Montoya.  Sonny falls for Montoya's business advisor/girlfriend Isabella (Gong Li), who is sort a female version of characters played by James Caan and Robert DeNiro in earlier Michael Mann films.  The action treks off Miami to Cuba, Haiti, and Central America at times.  Tubbs' girlfriend gets kidnapped.  There are large scale shootouts.  Also, sex in the shower at least twice.

The first half of MIAMI VICE is intriguingly amorphous.  It plays like a dream, with its opening moments feeling like you're joining this story after missing the first chapter.  Mann continually disorients us visually and aurally.  The dialogue among the cast is often half heard, spoken by weary people who are so cool you couldn't even hope to breathe their same oxygen.  It's technical overload, and it works if you're tuned to it.  My first viewing years ago was wracked with anxiety and confusion.  There was no metric of time, no logical connection of scenes.  My recent viewing? I let it go and went with the flow.  There's a story, you just have to let it reveal itself.  Don't go looking for any character development.  They're just apparitions in a tacky, sweaty landscape anyway.  Part of Mann's tool kit.  The director truly is the star here.

The second half of the movie picks up the pace.  The shit comes down for everyone and there are tense standoffs and instructions spoken over cell phones. There are tangibly emotional scenes in a hospital.  By then, you've earned it, dear viewer.  The movie comes to a reasonably satisfying close and doesn't feel hollow.  Not entirely, anyway.