Everybody down, Miami Vice!!!

[Stu Gotz]

This movie seemed to be a train wreck from the start, but seeing a few of the previews and reading some of the reviews, it seems to be a kickass, undercover cop movie. Not as good as Heat (what is), but still respectable.

Pretty fired up for this movie, although I am a bit bummed that Phillip Michael Thomas won't be bringing Teddy Prentiss and his Jamaican accent to the big screen.

[funkendrenchman]

Train wreck from the start? With Michael Mann directing?

[shmerham]

I hate it, but the trailers totally suck me in. Even though I *know* they're cheesy, they totally grab me.

My friend and I are big Miami Vice fans. We find it entertaining in both the pure form and the unintentional comedy form. Some of the scenes are so contrived, but at the same time you say "who gives a fuck?" I told her to wait till I visit her in late october to see it. I hope I can wait that long and that it's in some second-run theatre.

[MarsB]

Tubbs was Jamacian?

[bklyn]

Well Colin can always fall back on a porno career if Miami Vice flops.
What's that saying about the Black Irish again?

[Benny Profane]

Michael Mann gives good visuals.

[Cono Este]

Saw it. Micheal Mann does what he does best. Great visuals, awesome gun fight (better than heat), but the actors all lacked chemistry, and some were just piss poor.

Never the less, a couple of scenes are just so good that it makes the movie worth seeing. A small disapointment overall though.

edit to add: It was a little editing and alot of acting away from being perfect. Micheal Mann is an artist, he did his job, if you like what he does you will dig the movie. Cars, boats, Guns etc.. its all there. I just think Jamie Fox and Colin had no chemistry, and LI Gong was just awful. Could have been a masterpiece without them.

Its kinda lke the comparing the first season of the show to the rest, just wasnt what it could have been.

[Joey Joe Joe Junior Shabadoo]

My only question is does it have "Smuggler Blues" by Glenn Fry?

[Jumper Bones]

I'd disagree with Cono Este, and say it was phuckin' phenomenal. I wouldn't put it quite on par with Heat, as I see it as a different type of story, but I did like it better than Collateral, and I liked that one a fair bit. So it's up there with Heat.

3 things bothered me:

1) predicta-fuckin-ble love interest story, with a slutty character. I mean who wasn't she fucking???
2) Li Gong needed to speaka de better Engrish for the role. Don't know why she was the person she was. I guess they were trying to pull off an international businessperson? Dunno, she was hard to understand.
3) sometimes the hand-held digi-camera action shots got a bit carried away - too much bobbiness.

on the positive, great photography, the night scenes and lighting (esp distant t-storms) and nightime Miami gloom were awesome, flying scenes were pretty, and the gun battles were great, pretty intense.

oh and Micheal Mann is becoming a bit whorish to Audioslave. I counted 3 songs by them in this one, plus guitar tracks.

btw, little to link the movie to the old show - pastels are gone, music and scores gone, etc. No Smuggler's Blues, and no Jan Hammer anthem. And no I can feel it in the air tonight, at least not until credits.

[irul&ublo]

Its not Miami Vice without Edward James Olmos saying, "Crockett, Tubbs...my office."

[Greydon Clark]

I don't care about the mixed reviews, I'm hyped to see this movie.

[Arty50]

It's good to read this. I was worried about Colin Farrel like everyone else. Basically confirms what I've been telling people all along, trust in Michael Mann. That guy is a fucking genius.

I can't wait to go see this.

[Daywalker]

I went to it thinking it was going to be okay. Came out pretty stoked. It's a predictable action movie, yes, but it's a GOOD predictable action movie.

I can't go into the artsy fartsy director did this/that or character chemistry type shit because I forget about them when watching mainstream movies. Simplified veiw, it was a fun movie.

[Clack]

That donzi looks sick. Anyone with one of those wins the toy competition.

http://www.donzimarine.com/DonziWebs...iamiVice.html#

[shmerham]

it was a fun movie.

paging Marv Albert

I don't know if I can wait till late october to see this; this might fall under the "no friends on powder days" rule.

[Greydon Clark]

That donzi looks sick. Anyone with one of those wins the toy competition.

http://www.donzimarine.com/DonziWebs...iamiVice.html#

You are such a mullet.

[slim]

You are such a mullet.

Seriously.

[Tippster]

A.O. Scott liked it OK -

July 28, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
‘Miami Vice’: Operatic Passions, Yet Cool in the Heat
By A. O. SCOTT
IF there is a lesson to be extracted from the visual glories of “Miami Vice” — the painterly compositions of tropical sea and sky, the glowing, throbbing nightclub set pieces, the meticulously choreographed deployments of lethal force — it might be that love and work don’t mix. Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), the South Florida municipal employees whose labors preoccupy this movie (as they did its predecessor television series two decades ago), have pretty complicated jobs to begin with.

They impersonate highly skilled, business-minded drug couriers in the interests of bringing down far-reaching criminal enterprises, which means that they must be adept at handling fast boats, suitcases full of cash, small planes and large guns. Their private lives don’t take them far from the job. In his spare time Tubbs keeps company with a vice squad co-worker (Naomie Harris), while Crockett pursues a reckless affair with a drug kingpin’s wife and business associate (Gong Li), and these entanglements give the undercover work an extra jolt of intensity. By the time the final showdown with the bad guys comes around, Crockett and Tubbs have long since crossed the line that divides the professional from the personal.

But in the world of Michael Mann — a guiding creative force behind the small-screen “Miami Vice” and the writer and director of this movie version — no such line really exists. Whatever their particular jobs, his major characters tend to be men whose commitment to their professions transcends mere workaholism and becomes an all-consuming, almost operatic passion.

These men might be television producers or paid assassins, boxers or cabdrivers, cops or robbers or frontiersmen, and they might relate to one another as partners, antagonists or uneasy allies, but they all seem to share this essential trait. It is impossible to separate who they are from what they do. Crockett and Tubbs are not in it for the pension plan or the dental coverage, not for the planes and the boats and the cool sunglasses, not even for the righteous thrill of fighting crime. Their devotion to their work is irrational, risky, extravagant: you might even say crazy. They insist on doing it their own way, tolerating no interference from, for instance, some pencil-pushing F.B.I. suit (Ciaran Hinds).

In other words, they’re a lot like the detectives played by William L. Petersen in “Manhunter” and Al Pacino in “Heat,” or like Tom Cruise’s hit man in “Collateral,” to name just a few. Which is also to say that, like most of Mr. Mann’s men, they betray a telling resemblance to the man himself. Never one for compromise or restraint, this filmmaker throws himself into every frame, turning genre movies into feverish spectacles of style and feeling.

With “Miami Vice” he clearly had money to burn, and the flames are beautiful to behold. Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle. He fuses music, pulsating color and high drama into something that is occasionally nonsensical and frequently sublime. “Miami Vice” is an action picture for people who dig experimental art films, and vice versa.

I’m not exaggerating about the art. Some of the most captivating sequences have an abstract quality, as if Mr. Mann were paying homage to the avant-garde, anti-narrative cinema of Stan Brakhage in the midst of a big studio production. Dispensing with the convention that the pictures exist to serve the story, Mr. Mann frequently uses plot as an excuse to construct ravishing pictures.

The camera, with leisurely, voluptuous sensuality, ranges from crowded cities to the open sea, from billowy thunderheads to the rippling muscles on Mr. Foxx’s back. Like “Collateral,” “Miami Vice” was shot in high-definition digital video, which Mr. Mann, in collaboration with the brilliant cinematographer Dion Beebe, treats not as a convenient substitute for film but as a medium with its own aesthetic properties and visual possibilities. The depth of focus, the intensity of colors, and the grainy, smudged finish of some of the images combine to create a look that is both vividly naturalistic and almost dreamlike.

Not that the narrative makes too many concessions to realism, apart from the occasional swatch of untranslated law-enforcement jargon (“Our op-sec has been compromised”) and the rumpled, workaday presence of the wonderful Barry Shabaka Henley as Lieutenant Castillo, the down-to-earth commanding officer played on television by Edward James Olmos.

There is a basic setup involving white-supremacist methamphetamine dealers that is a red herring and the foreshadowing of a later surprise, but before too long we’re in the familiar world of heartless Latin American drug lords (in this case a retiring fellow played by Luis Tosar) and their sadistic minions (John Ortiz, looking like an especially disgruntled graduate student). The case requires elaborate cover, buckets of money and the finest, fastest air and sea vessels the taxpayers of Miami can afford. Not really, of course. The actual operating budget for the Miami police department in fiscal year 2005 was around $100 million, a good $50 million less than the reported production costs of “Miami Vice.”




The action jumps from Paraguay to Haiti, from Colombia to Cuba (impersonated, as usual, by the Dominican Republic), where Crockett and his lady friend drop in for cocktails one evening after work. The movie’s swirl of danger, glamour and professionalism expands the central conceit of the series, which was to imagine a pair of urban cops who looked, dressed and acted like movie stars.

After the show became a hit, real movie stars would occasionally swing by for a visit. Still, the old Crockett and Tubbs, played by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, carried a lot of baggage onto the set: divorces, dead partners, Vietnam, the N.Y.P.D. Their new, improved selves, by contrast, travel light and sleek, with no back stories to burden the picture with exposition. Except for something about Crockett’s daddy and the Allman Brothers, which explains Mr. Farrell’s mustache, if not his peculiar accent.

When the show made its debut in 1984, Mr. Johnson was a has-been — or never-quite-was — movie star, which helped give his character a grizzled, disappointed element of soulfulness. In the movie version, though, only real movie stars, who command attention simply by allowing the camera to behold them, will do. Mr. Foxx, sly, taciturn and effortlessly charismatic, certainly fulfills the requirement, as does Ms. Gong, a goddess of global cinema whose every word you hang on even when you can’t understand a single one. If there is any justice in the world, Ms. Harris (who can also be seen this summer in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”) will join their ranks before long.

Mr. Farrell, however, is a movie star only in the sense that Richard Gephardt is president of the United States. He’s always looked good on paper, and he’s picked up some endorsements along the way — from Oliver Stone, Joel Schumacher and Terrence Malick, among others — but somehow it has never quite happened. Here he squints and twitches to suggest emotion and slackens his lower lip to suggest lust, concern or deep contemplation, but despite his good looks he lacks that mysterious quality we call presence.

Mr. Mann’s script has its share of silly, overwrought lines, but they only really sound that way in Mr. Farrell’s mouth. (Did he really say, “I’m a fiend for mojitos”? ¡Dios mío!) When he’s not on screen, you don’t miss him, and when he is, you find yourself, before long, looking at someone or something else. Gong Li. A boat. A lightning bolt illuminating the humid summer sky.

Yet the flaws in “Miami Vice” are in the end part of its pulpy grandeur. It is in some ways an entirely gratuitous movie: the influence of the original series can be seen in any number of big car-chase-and-fireball crime thrillers, from “Bad Boys” to “Bad Boys II.” There isn’t much to add. But the irrelevance of this project makes Mr. Mann’s quixotic devotion to it seem perversely heroic. This was not a job that anyone needed to do, but then again no one could have done it better.

“Miami Vice” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has heavy swearing, heavy breathing and heavy gunplay.

[pointedem]

that movie was sick
I want two things now.

1) To go to Havana with a hottie and mad coin.
2) To own and drive a Ferrarri.

[Clack]

You are such a mullet.

Seriously.

There's an endless supply of free gas in my heaven.

[Greydon Clark]

There's an endless supply of free gas in my heaven.

Your heaven sounds a lot like my ass.

[Clack]

Fucking hippie..... Take your paddle boats and teepees and tree frogs and shove them up your ass.


Give me fuel

Give me fire

Give me that which I desire




I guess I'm a little mullet. You want to come bow hunting next weekend in Almanor?

[Greydon Clark]

Fucking
I guess I'm a little mullet. You want to come bow hunting next weekend in Almanor?

Sure. Historically, it has been very kind to the animals.

[shmerham]

Saw the "director's cut" on dvd last week. Opening scene (which I think wasn't in the theatrical version) with the underwater camera coming up out of the water during the boat race was frickin amazing.

I'm with clack on the donzi - pretty sharp.