I still remember my utter disappointment with this movie from more than 15 years ago. Miami Vice was one of my favorite shows while growing up and I was anxious to see it on a big screen. The exotic setting, excellent leads, and great crime stories kept my eyes peeled on the TV screen for years. Decades passed and I almost entirely forgot about Sonny and Rico’s adventures. And then, out of nowhere, this movie pops up, directed by none other than Michael Mann. Yes, the same guy behind such masterpieces as Thief, Manhunter, and Heat. And the leads were just as good as I liked both Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. The end result, however, is underwhelming, to say the least.
Miami Vice, the movie, is a messy, generic, and visually unimpressive thriller barely worth watching. You can clearly see what Mann was trying to do here. He wanted to take everything that made the original television show great and add a healthy dose of authenticity and grittiness to it. Alas, this also meant that the camerawork would be of that hand-held and grainy variety. While this was a relatively good decision in Collateral, here it totally killed the big movie vibe. It made Miami Vice feel like a cheap straight-to-video release complete with the plot we’ve seen a thousand times before.
Remember, the budget for this movie was a whopping $150 million! The character development was just as bad and there was simply no chemistry between Sonny and Rico. They feel more like colleagues who work together than best friends who actually care about one another. This is no “buddy movie”, that’s for sure. The same goes for the rest of the characters. And since we don’t care about them, we don’t care about what happens to them. Moreover, the movie tries so hard to portray their work as dangerous that you’re kind of expecting them to end up dead.
Colin Farrell said the same thing adding that the movie turned out to be “style-over-substance”. You could actually argue that Miami Vice, the movie, is a dark love story. We will be focusing on the romance between Sonny and Isabella, a cartel operator who falls in love with our undercover agent. This reminds me, I should probably tell you something about the plot. So, we have our two detectives, Sonny and Rico, who stumble upon a big and secretive crime network through one of their informants. It would appear that they have an inside man telling them all about both the FBI’s and local police’s efforts.
You fight fire with fire and Sonny and Rico decide to pose as drug smugglers. They set off on a dangerous mission that’s not going to end well for all the parties involved. Apart from Farrell and Fox, we also have Ciarán Hinds (Rome), Gong Li (Memoirs of a Geisha), and Naomie Harris (Skyfall). As a bonus, Luis Tosar (Sleep Tight), one of my favorite Spanish actors plays the main bad guy. I want to emphasize that what happened here is not the actors’ fault. They simply got a subpar script. Pay close attention to its clumsy and forced attempts at establishing certain character traits.
For example, all the gang lingo just feels ridiculous, even if it’s true. It’s not what you said, it’s how you’ve said it. Miami Vice was obviously made as the first part of a big trilogy. However, poor box office performance and a lot of bad reviews changed that. It would be cool though if someone else took the reigns and continued the project. I have to admit that in the end, I was kind of curious about what was going to happen with a couple of major subplots that were intentionally left unresolved. Moreover, Miami Vice does have some really good elements.
The atmosphere is indeed dark and gritty. When you go undercover, things can go wrong at any point in time. In fact, Colin Farrell trained with real undercover operatives and was a part of a real sting operation. However, after suffering from insomnia and anxiety he had to pull out. You can see footage of this in the extras section (DVD or Blu-Ray). The agent in-charge told him the following morning that the sting was actually not real and that he was never in any real danger. Sonny and Rico, though, will be in a lot of danger.
Miami Vice, the movie, was shot not just in Miami, Florida but also in Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Dominican Republic. Some of these locations were really dangerous prompting Mann to even hire criminals as part of the security crew. However, this is also a double-edged sword as a real shootout on the set in the Dominican Republic forced the production to stop filming. Jamie Foxx immediately ran to the US while the original, Dominican Republic, ending had to be replaced with a Miami one. That particular shootout felt rushed, simplistic, and unimpressive.
Director: Michael Mann
Writers: Michael Mann, Anthony Yerkovich
Cast: Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Gong Li, Naomie Harris, Ciarán Hinds, Luis Tosar, John Ortiz
Fun Facts: Sal Magluta, the drug trafficker Sonny and Rico replace, was a real-life criminal who actually did smuggle cocaine into Florida via speedboats (go-fasts). He appears in the infamous and highly entertaining documentary Cocaine Cowboys.
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IMDb Link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430357/
