Miami Vice

2006
Written and Directed By Michael Mann
Starring Colin Ferrell and Jamie Foxx
With Li Gong and Justin Theroux

Oh Michael, where did you go?  Miami Vice has nearly played itself out of the top ten, and unless DV filming accounts for a much smaller gross, it looks like Mr. Mann will be posting his least profitable film since The Keep.  The difference now is that when The Keep came and went no one knew who Mann was, or what he could accomplish.  One dose of Heat and a slice of The Insider later, there's no chance that something as disappointing as Miami Vice can go unremarked upon.  Of course, the failure that is Vice is not totally his fault-after all, it's incredibly gorgeous, the violence is fascinating and Jamie Foxx's abs are above reproach--in fact, a good portion of the blame for the sheer mundane stupidity has to rest in and on the hands and muttonchops of Colin Ferrell.  Mr. Ferrell so completely sleepwalks and shambles through his performance that merely watching him for five minutes creates an entirely new genre of fun: come on, theater-goer, join us: "When was Colin actually good, in anything?" and if you mention New World again, than i'm gonna...

But as horrible as Colin is, eventually, as Descartes proposed, we circle back to Mr. Mann.  After all, he did write the script--and one doubts it took him very long.  Even if it did, what he ended up with is so completely full of cliched garbage that it comes across like Dick Tracy on angel dust and by the time one finally reaches the film's requisite attempt at re-creating the magic of the bank heist in Heat, one is desperately trying to focus memory solely on bloodshed if only to get the horror the English language has just endured out of one's mind; the script (if it could be said to have one) seems like something that Mann might have come up with while junked out on blow and watching old episodes of Vice itself, but with the sound turned off--did Tubbs just say "Skillset?"  It's an easy claim, and it's been made multiple times in the last few weeks, that "a bad movie by Michael Mann is still better than a good movie by Todd Haynes," and while that may be true, especially if you compared Vice to Velvet Goldmine, this time there's really no honest arguement for why looking at jpg files from Miami Vice in an air-conditioned office wouldn't be far preferable than sitting through such a meandering piece of tripe.  Just saying how great it looks isn't going to be enough this time. 

Although we here at The Factual are loath to attempt to answer the question "why" in most circumstances, we will do so--after all, the editors have all agreed on one consensus: there's just no plausible reason why this movie was made in the first place.  If Mr. Mann would've just liked to return to the cops and crooks genre after vacationing in the sunny lands of bio-pics (Ali, The Insider) and character studies (Collateral), than he should have done so with a more sure footing.  Incorporating in the moronic ideals of a long-cancelled television show that barely survives in re-runs probably crippled him from the outset.  Poor choices in casting are to blame, sure, but if Joel Shumacher has taught us anything, it's that you can make Colin seem intelligent. (Tigerland)  Michael Mann is one of the few directors who is able to capitalize on an actors weakness (Al Pacino for one) and tame a lunatic actors wild choices (Russell Crowe and Val Kilmer for another.)  Mann surely could have done it again, despite Li Gong's incomprehensible speech pattern, if he'd gone into making a film with the same level of courage he took to dismantling Last of the Mohicans or Manhunter.  Instead, he sold off his courage, intelligence and integrity and made the second worst film of his career.  (Look, The Keep is really, really bad.)

Comments

[Irrelevant]

I really like The Keep.