Miami Vice

Miami Vice (2006)
Director: Michael Mann
Actors: Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Gong Li

Synopsis: Crockett and Tubbs (Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx) embed themselves deep in a new and dangerous drug cartel which is operating through Miami.

Review: This is one of the great American movies of the new millenium. It is quite simply the most sensuous action movie I’ve ever seen, and director Michael Mann seems able to infuse all the hackneyed elements of other crime and action films – fast cars, chases, explosions, gunfights – with a new kind of excitement and balletic frisson.

Some critics have chastised Miami Vice for its ultra-seriousness, but that strikes me as a really bogus and vapid critique. We live in a (cinematic) world now of such cynicism and postmodernism, that this pared-down genre film, almost classically old-fashioned in its concentrated focus on the dangerous lives led by both the cops and criminals, seems a shock to our blasé systems. I find the film’s whole confident idiom of hushed, technical conversations, the credible cop-criminal lexicon of  “go-fast boats”, “outsourced” segments of the smuggling chain and “blown covers”, utterly thrilling.

Also, although the film is only nominally set in Miami, having lived there for a year, I think the film in its overall palette and scintillating hi-def cinematography seems to get the stormy, noirish vibe beyond the city’s neon veneer. And, of course, Miami is in some respects more married to the Americas of the Caribbean and Latin America than it is to North America.

The film also creates such convincing portraits of its cop and criminal personnel. In his relatively few scenes, Luis Tosar does such a great job with his imposing drug kingpin, Montoya, and even the head of the Aryan Brotherhood has a distinctive persona and an interestingly elegiac death scene when he has the moment’s realisation that Colin Farrell’s Crockett has just beaten him to the fatal shot. Perhaps the apex to the whole of Miami Vice though is in Crockett’s affair with Montoya’s mistress and business partner, Isabella. The courtship scene in Havana with mojitos, salsa dancing and fatalistic conversations, might sound hard to pull off, but thanks to the two actors, and of course Mann’s swoonworthy direction, it provides the suitable emotional and poignant undertow to all the film’s deadly, professional machinations. (April 2013)