Having loved Heat, enjoyed The Insider, and been mostly entertained by Collateral (even if its beautiful scenes and two excellent lead performances are compromised by a disappointing final act and some goofy scenes), I’d been meaning to check out Michael Mann’s Miami Vice for years. The movie’s fairly middling critical reception dimmed this anticipation somewhat, so my DVD copy remained untouched on my bookshelf for almost a decade. Now that I’ve finally seen it, I can understand why the film was met with a somewhat polarising reception, though I have to admit it was nothing like what I had anticipated.
I expected a stylised but emotionally vacant thriller, with strong leading performances held up by heaps of bravado and shit-talking between protagonist detectives James “Sonny” Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs (Jamie Foxx). A typical action comedy thriller, essentially. In no way had I anticipated anything so deconstructive and subversive as the end result, where both detectives don’t seem to have anything resembling a note-worthy relationship, while the film itself isn’t just humourless, it’s downright moody.
Miami Vice doesn’t have a very absorbing opening scene, but it does effectively introduce us to most of its core cast as they all converge at a nightclub. Unfortunately, this scene ticks the box for one of my biggest cinematic pet peeves, where characters talk at a normal volume despite supposedly being in crowded nightclubs where their every word should be drowned out by loud music. So many movies miss out on capturing the confusing haze of blaring music, flashing lights, and crowded dancefloors by forgetting to get the actors to shout their lines at one another, or more egregiously, making one section of the nightclub half-empty so it’s easier to stage dialogue scenes where multiple characters are in frame. Miami Vice is a failure on all those fronts, sadly (and if you’re looking for a film that knows exactly how to capture the feeling of a nightclub setting, Fincher’s The Social Network sets the benchmark for how it should be done.)
Unfortunately, what follows isn’t much more successful. Mann’s immersive camerawork follows an unusual rhythm and gets up close and personal with its subjects, but while there are intriguing visuals and beautiful uses of colour throughout Miami Vice, there are just as many shots that aim for grittiness and only end up looking cheap. The plot isn’t sleek, nor is the story sexy or vibrant. People talk and there are a few action set pieces along the way, but there’s something so weightless about the whole experience that there’s no momentum driving it forward. It’s as if plenty of time was spent on capturing the particulars of its locales and how to shoot them, and in the midst of the ordered chaos that is a film shoot, Mann and his collaborators forgot to think of a reason for why Miami Vice exists.
I felt this way right up until I watched Crockett and Isabella (Gong Li) take a speedboat to Cuba, where they forget all about this world and its many threads and lose themselves in one another. Time is precious and their relationship isn’t built to last, so they use its inevitable end to focus only on each other while they still can. It’s here that the movie finally clicked. I was paying attention to all of the wrong things. Minutes of dialogue can go by without a single line of importance being uttered (though there are some gems across the two-hour runtime). The real clues are in the actors’ faces, the haunting soundtrack, and the colourful visuals.
I still maintain that the attempts at gritty shots often look cheap, like an admirable but inconsistent attempt at mimicking Terrence Malick’s cinematography. But as a whole, Miami Vice is like if Malick directed an action movie, which is more than a little intriguing. There are truly mesmerising sequences that make you feel like you’re basking in an ocean, letting the colours and mood flow through you, with plenty of scenes that feel like excuses to sink into the visual poem that is Miami Vice.
Long before its truly sorrowful scenes occur, the movie is drenched in sadness, capturing this feeling so acutely that it’s shocking to think a movie like this could ever have been made. This is a $60 million art film from one of cinema’s greatest action directors, which has fully earned the retrospective praise it’s accrued in the years since its release. You can see its influence clearly in the movie industry, too. I would have never thought I’d be referencing Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and Ridley Scott’s The Counsellor in the same sentence, but now that I’ve finally watched Miami Vice, I can’t imagine either of them existing without this film.
Miami is possibly the most prominent character of all here, a presence that maintains its icy grip over all of these characters, pitting them in a doomed dance with one another. When Crockett and Isabella are together, they seem like the only ones who’ve got life figured out, but even they must reckon with its sorrow, remembering that promises are so easy to make and so hard to keep. Meanwhile, I was busy reckoning with a film that was frequently beautiful yet sometimes boring, pristine in places yet scattershot in others. But even for its faults, I don’t think I’d want Miami Vice any other way. It drops in and out of its own narrative, knowing that over time it will immerse you in its unique tone. Once it becomes clear that mood is the only thing that matters, more often than not, it’s a joy to behold.
