Miami Vice (Michael Mann, 2006)

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Well, the last interview I read with Mann on the subject of a sequel (while he was doing press in Asia, I believe) was that he'd only do it if he came up with a good enough idea and was able to crank out a screenplay. It sounds like he's got at least 3 other projects on his plate fighting for his time. I dunno. I just don't see this happening in the near future. But who knows? If the DVD sales are strong (which I'm sure they will)... Stranger things have happened.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

An interesting article in the Guardian about the role fashion, architecture, guns and vehicles play in Mann's films.

[Michael]

Finally watched Miami Vice. Colin Farrell was so funny. He had only one emotion through the whole movie! His eyes remained unchanged - like two giant black cast iron skillets.

What can I say about the movie other than "so fucking great!". I've been suggesting this movie to everyone at work all today.

[Matt]

What can I say about the movie other than "so fucking great!". I've been suggesting this movie to everyone at work all today.

I so rarely recommend movies to people I know (unless I really know their taste), but when people at work ask me "So what movie should I rent?" I have been suggesting Miami Vice. Invariably, the response is "Really?"

I suppose it's better than the blank looks I got when I used to suggest The New World.

[Michael]

Two at work had already seen it and responded: "Worst shit" and "stupid". Even my partner said to me: "I can't believe you rented this". He hasn't seen it yet but I've already convinced him to see it tonight. He loves digital photography and I told him that Miami Vice has the most astonishing photography of that kind I've seen. He bought it.

However I admit I was not enthusiastic about seeing it during its theatrical run and decided to wait for the DVD. Michael Mann is a hit and miss director and the title itself makes it hard not to think of the 80s pastels. But holy shit, the movie kicked me, leaving me in total awe.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

However I admit I was not enthusiastic about seeing it during its theatrical run and decided to wait for the DVD. Michael Mann is a hit and miss director and the title itself makes it hard not to think of the 80s pastels. But holy shit, the movie kicked me, leaving me in total awe.

Glad you dug it. Yeah, the film got slammed pretty bad in the press despite some good reviews in the mainstream papers (NYT) and hopefully it will get rediscovered on DVD. It was really cool to see this on the big screen, though. The sound, I seem to recall, was very impressive -- esp. the gunshots which were practically deafening in the theater!

[Antoine Doinel]

Finally watched Miami Vice. Colin Farrell was so funny. He had only one emotion through the whole movie! His eyes remained unchanged - like two giant black cast iron skillets.

That's hardly a ringing endorsement.

[Michael]

That's hardly a ringing endorsement.

I meant it in a good way. I think Colin is just perfect for the part.

[lord_clyde]

Everyone I know who has seen the movie has hated it, except all of you. *sigh* I better rent it. These friends also kept me from seeing The New World for almost a year.

[sevenarts]

I continue to be mystified by all the praise heaped on this movie here. I guess this is what uncompromising auterism leads to -- once a director has made a few good movies, even his failures are subjected to ridiculous levels of analysis and attention. Mann's undeniably a talented director, and he's made some fantastic films, but there's just nothing going on in this movie. It's as empty as Colin Farrell's head. The characters are entirely flat, the "romance" is as cheesy and perfunctory as possible, and the plot simply ambles around at random as if it's just waiting for the final action scene to arrive. And then I come into this thread and see people saying that Mann intended the characters to be flat and generic, and intended for the plot to be boring and mechanical. Well, OK, I'm willing to accept that, and if that was the goal he certainly succeeded. But it doesn't make the movie any better.

I loved Collateral, and that wasn't a particularly deep movie either. But it was stylishly shot, the acting was great, and I actually really cared about the characters -- the interactions between Foxx and Cruise were brilliant. In Miami Vice, most of the acting is horrible, and the characters are cardboard, and the plot never goes anywhere interesting. It's still stylish, and the cinematography is lovely, but that's never enough to rescue a film.

[John Cope]

I continue to be mystified by all the praise heaped on this movie here. I guess this is what uncompromising auterism leads to -- once a director has made a few good movies, even his failures are subjected to ridiculous levels of analysis and attention.

Oh please, sevenarts, don't go all Barmy on us.

Mann's undeniably a talented director, and he's made some fantastic films, but there's just nothing going on in this movie. It's as empty as Colin Farrell's head. The characters are entirely flat, the "romance" is as cheesy and perfunctory as possible, and the plot simply ambles around at random as if it's just waiting for the final action scene to arrive. And then I come into this thread and see people saying that Mann intended the characters to be flat and generic, and intended for the plot to be boring and mechanical. Well, OK, I'm willing to accept that, and if that was the goal he certainly succeeded. But it doesn't make the movie any better.

I guess I can understand that reaction but I would counter that with this. If you see the picture as boring and mechanical it may be because you simply don't assign any significance to these purposive strides. This whole argument boils down to an analogue for an argument over issues of faith. Either you see it and value it or you don't. I really don't think there's much else to say on the subject at this point. It's more a matter of perception and participation than persuasion.

I loved Collateral, and that wasn't a particularly deep movie either. But it was stylishly shot, the acting was great, and I actually really cared about the characters -- the interactions between Foxx and Cruise were brilliant. In Miami Vice, most of the acting is horrible, and the characters are cardboard, and the plot never goes anywhere interesting. It's still stylish, and the cinematography is lovely, but that's never enough to rescue a film.

Collateral is great and, I would argue, rich and deep on its own terms. But Vice is in another category altogether. It's a seismic advancement from everything Mann has done before, though the foundations are set in place years earlier and it all feels inevitably to have led to this place. As indicated above, there is no reason to dismiss the film's formal achievements as empty or hollow or insignificant unless you deem formalism always to be an empty, aesthetic accoutrement and to have no potential greater implication. What I have been glad to see in the months since this movie's release is the number of pieces written on it which approach it from an angle appreciative of its singular accomplishment.

Having said all that I wanted to add a few thoughts about the "Director's Edition" DVD. I was planning on posting this at some point on the DVD thread but it seems appropriate to do it here, even though I'd really like to have another pass through it to nail down my response.

To put it simply, I was very impressed with this version of the film and I was pretty surprised to be. I'd been putting it off as I'd heard that it was essentially just some reconfiguration designed to satisfy a more conventional set of action audience expectations and I didn't want to see Mann bastardize his work like that. Thankfully, though, this does not happen. In fact, what's most remarkable is that Mann actually took the time to truly craft a viable alternative version that is not all that different substantively but stands apart as a separate and unique experience given its emphases.

The tone is established from the start with opening credits that I had feared would seem gratuitous in light of the great opening to the theatrical cut. But the striking thing about these credits is how literally tiny they are on screen; how they quietly indicate what will be the emotional truth of the whole enterprise--that these lives are small and virtually indiscernible in the greater scheme. Also, the font acts in opposition to the florid style and hyper masculinity of the series credits which come at you with a pounding, declarative insistence (it reminds me a little of what Martha Nochimson said about the opening scene to Lynch's Dune--that positioning Princess Irulan's head as dominant over the starfield acted as acknowledgment of a certain kind of arrogance).

Anyway, the opening boat race is great, extending Mann's formal intentions that much further. But what it also does, as has been noted elsewhere, is to set up a context which allows for a more comfortable experience with the rest of the picture. The club scene is not dislocating and disrupting now, the characters not such vague ciphers. What ultimately results from this angle of entry (and all the additional material, even the song laid over the final confrontation) is that we are able this time to see the personal tragedy more clearly. It has greater resonance for us because we can empathize (albeit in a conventional fashion) with the struggles of these characters to escape their self-created chrysalis of narrow identification and suffocating routine. As I've said elsewhere, the show dealt with men who often struggled with the amoral false fronts they had to inhabit; the film introduces us to these characters when they have become worn down, when whatever struggle there may have been is a thing of the past. The characters in the film have forgotten even what they once were and how or why to salvage it. They are mechanistic indeed and the flashes in the sky or the curvature of the horizon line emphasizes their status of a piece with the unity of the frame, the flatness of it all. Or....perhaps it offers an alternative. A vastness unexplored, incapable of being explored by little people with delimited agendas. Whatever the case, the "Director's Edition" succeeds on its own specific terms as a work which makes us feel that particular loss vividly. I, for one, certainly can't say that about the theatrical cut. They have different intents, in other words, the theatrical being more remote and objective and the DVD version more subjective and emotional. There is a place for both.

BTW, here's a link to dKaz's reassessment of the pic. As usual, an ambivalent but searching response that nails what is great and valuable about this picture without fully understanding why:

For instance:

Even if one could get over Miami Vice's baffling, fascinating aesthetic, there is still Mann's script to deal with, and frankly I have no clue what is at stake in this film. Here are two amazingly good looking men living a lifestyle of danger, affluence, and flash, and then Tubbs worriedly asks Sonny if he is "in too deep." In too deep in what? The lifestyle of Tubbs and Crockett undercover is their normal lifestyle; or maybe the whole idea is that these men are criminals, so long living the gleam of the drug-dealer lifestyle that it has become part of their brooding self-images. Perhaps they seek out that much mythologized line between the cops and robbers so often, and as recklessly, and as senselessly as possible so as only to tell themselves they are better and less hollow than they know themselves to be. The usually expressive male brooding of Mann's world is instead translated into a general hollowness in these two men that sometimes—and only sometimes—appears as a nameless sadness, one seen in that distant look come so-often to Farrell's eyes and to Foxx's subdued suppression of character. It is a sadness of guys who have to keep this up not just because they love the attitude, but because they need to justify it, and they do not know what to do without it.

[davebert]

I only managed to encounter Vice in its DVD form, and I should add that I too greatly enjoyed the film and was astonished by what I saw in light of the overwhelmingly negative press. I'm glad to check the thread and realize people agreed--I was feeling kind of like a pariah after enjoying this and Scoop.

It struck me towards the end that I had been roped into a story that refused to tie up perhaps up to a half of its script. The club bust early in the film that the agents scrap to get involved with the drug deal (aka the switch from routine job to The Movie) provides a lot of information on associated characters and a subplot, considering they never return to it. But it then occured to me that this is perhaps a more realistic way of scripting an action movie, in which you just do your job until something major goes down, which causes a re-evaluation of priorities.

Oh, and the creepy murals (which can be seen gracing the back of the DVD cover) make for spectacular atmosphere. I want one on the outside of my building...

[sevenarts]

Oh please, sevenarts, don't go all Barmy on us.

Ouch, now that's just insulting. Heh. I'm not just trying to be provocative here. It just seems to me that if this film was made by a mainstream Hollywood director other than Mann, people would be taking its slick surface and empty characters for exactly that: slick emptiness. But because this is an acclaimed director with some good films behind him, the inclination is naturally to look deeper and read into it far more than is actually there. That's perfectly normal. All I'm saying is that even good directors can make bad films.

I guess I can understand that reaction but I would counter that with this. If you see the picture as boring and mechanical it may be because you simply don't assign any significance to these purposive strides. This whole argument boils down to an analogue for an argument over issues of faith. Either you see it and value it or you don't. I really don't think there's much else to say on the subject at this point. It's more a matter of perception and participation than persuasion.

Well, there's no arguing with that. Reactions to films, like everything else, are entirely subjective. This was my reaction, and I don't think I was alone by any means, though there is this growing community of people who did seem to see something in the film.

Collateral is great and, I would argue, rich and deep on its own terms. But Vice is in another category altogether. It's a seismic advancement from everything Mann has done before, though the foundations are set in place years earlier and it all feels inevitably to have led to this place. As indicated above, there is no reason to dismiss the film's formal achievements as empty or hollow or insignificant unless you deem formalism always to be an empty, aesthetic accoutrement and to have no potential greater implication.

I'd be the last person to ever argue that, and that's not at all my complaint with the film. I often appreciate formalist filmmaking, and on a purely formal level Vice looks as good as Collateral or Heat before it. My complaints are not with the formalism of the film, but with its complete lack of substance. Good filmmaking in this kind of genre mode is often a matter of balancing the concerns of generic fulfillment against character, plot, and any deeper points the director wishes to communicate through some combination of these. In Vice, there is no sense of genre fulfillment -- judged as an action movie or a cop movie or whatever, it's incredibly dull and unsatisfying. But there's no corresponding increase in complexity in the characters or plot to make up for this, as in so many other genre-subversion films. I have yet to see anyone argue that these characters are anything more than ciphers, or that the plot is any more intrinsically interesting than a thousand other Hollywood by-the-numbers cop flicks. Mann has basically taken this genre film background, taken away everything that usually inhabits those types of films, and left a very stylish-looking skeleton of plot and characterization. Presumably, the only conceivable purpose in doing this is to communicate something, but I'll be damned if anything of substance got across to me while watching it, and most of the explications of the movie's supposed themes just seem like tortured justifications for its numbing boredom.

[Mr Sausage]

I'm not just trying to be provocative here. It just seems to me that if this film was made by a mainstream Hollywood director other than Mann, people would be taking its slick surface and empty characters for exactly that: slick emptiness. But because this is an acclaimed director with some good films behind him, the inclination is naturally to look deeper and read into it far more than is actually there. That's perfectly normal. All I'm saying is that even good directors can make bad films.

I'm usually wary of arguments that boil down to declaring the other side delusional, at least where movies are concerned (politics is another story).

You might be right about the fact that if Miami Vice wasn't directed by Mann many people would find the movie little more than slick emptiness. But I don't think that's indicative of anything besides the way in which the name of an artist can encourage people to look closer and pay more attention to a movie. Active viewership is active viewership; who cares what provokes it?

Nor do I think Mann's name is causing people to pack the movie full of their own imaginings; I think it is a seriously interesting (and don't get me wrong, damn entertaining) movie. It is very much concerned with surfaces and, to some degree, emptiness. But nowhere in the movie do I get the sense that those surfaces--not just the surfaces in the compositions, but in the drama as well--merely exist for their own pretty sake. There is always the sense that the aesthetic exists for a specific purpose, is performing a calculated function. I contrast this to many action movies whose slick surfaces are little more than crass attempts to appeal to what the filmmakers think the audience these days will eat up. Mann is clearly not playing to a wide audience in his movie; on the contrary, it's pretty uncompromising in its structure (at least in the theatrical version--I haven't seen that redux he gave it).

Which is to say, despite the fact that you find it turgidly empty, the movie in no way feels like your traditionally empty thriller. And I think that deserves close attention. Mann's films have always been concerned with surfaces; Miami Vice has stripped away most of the other elements usually found in Mann's movies and makes those surfaces the central and guiding focus of the movie. Miami Vice may not be expressing big ideas or heavy drama or other traditionally intellectual fare, but that in no way makes it a forgone conclusion that, since those surfaces are so prevalent, they must be empty; or that the movie's exploration of that aesthetic must be empty because the subject of its gaze seems empty.

Hmm. On a lighter note, great bloody gunfight. Miami Vice gets my applause just for that.

[marty]

Mann's undeniably a talented director, and he's made some fantastic films, but there's just nothing going on in this movie. It's as empty as Colin Farrell's head. The characters are entirely flat, the "romance" is as cheesy and perfunctory as possible, and the plot simply ambles around at random as if it's just waiting for the final action scene to arrive.

Oh man, did you ever see the TV show Miami Vice? People are saying it's nothing like the TV show but I beg to differ. It is exactly like the TV show with Tubbs and Crockett going undercover to catch these sleazy crims. It's just more cinematic. The terrific use of music is similar as the film rarely goes by without a riff or two. It's stylish as hell and it glows like a neon-light. This is one of the best films of last year.

[davebert]

I would just like to give a shout out to Crime Story, actually, because I'm currently enjoying the hell out of that. I just wish Mann had taken the helm more often than just just executive producing it, but for a two season run it packs a lot of punch.

[lord_clyde]

Enjoyed the movie quite a bit, favorite visual is definitely the whole scene of Colin and Gong Li in the gofast boat. Honestly, I've never seen the ocean look so beautiful.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

My complaints are not with the formalism of the film, but with its complete lack of substance. Good filmmaking in this kind of genre mode is often a matter of balancing the concerns of generic fulfillment against character, plot, and any deeper points the director wishes to communicate through some combination of these. In Vice, there is no sense of genre fulfillment -- judged as an action movie or a cop movie or whatever, it's incredibly dull and unsatisfying. But there's no corresponding increase in complexity in the characters or plot to make up for this, as in so many other genre-subversion films. I have yet to see anyone argue that these characters are anything more than ciphers, or that the plot is any more intrinsically interesting than a thousand other Hollywood by-the-numbers cop flicks.

I disagree. I found the plot to be quite fascinating -- the notion that these undercover guys go so deep into their roles that they are dealing with international cartels who have the latest technology at their disposal. These guys make the drug lords in the original show look like dime store drug dealers and I know that's what got Mann interested in making the film in the first place. Why just repeat/rehash the show?

I don't think that Mann was trying to subvert genre with this film Mann rather transcend it by pushing the boundaries farther than it had been done before. And he did this by stripping down the plot and characterization to its bare bones, to give us as little information as possible so that we do part of the work, fill in some of the gaps and draw our own conclusions about where these characters have been and what might have brought them to this moment in their lives.

Of course, you can debate at how successful he was at achieving this. But I felt that he nailed it but in doing so he created a $100 million+ art movie of sorts and that kind of movie doesn't = boffo box office unfortunately, which if he is going to continue to make big-time studio-backed movies, he's got to produce results for them and its perceived box office failure may hurt his next project.

[lord_clyde]

I'm probably going to get the dvd today, I've seen the theatrical cut, is the director's edition superior or what?

[jorencain]

I'm probably going to get the dvd today, I've seen the theatrical cut, is the director's edition superior or what?

In the end, it's still the same movie. Other than the opening sequence, I couldn't tell what the differences were. They're very similar, and I had no problem with the Directors Cut.

[lord_clyde]

In the end, it's still the same movie. Other than the opening sequence, I couldn't tell what the differences were. They're very similar, and I had no problem with the Directors Cut.

My tax returns were triple what I was expecting, so maybe I'll get both

[Fletch F. Fletch]

There is an excellent analysis of the film over at Senses of Cinema

[marty]

There is an excellent analysis of the film over at Senses of Cinema

Yeah, read that yesterday. Senses of Cinema is one of my favourite film online journals (if not my fave). I just can't believe it is Australian and based where I live in Melbourne!

[Len]

I take back whatever negative remarks I might've made about the "unrated cut". Watched it again last week and found myself enjoying it quite a bit. The additions are small but for the most part fit in the film very well and there are some really choice scenes that should've never been cut out of the film in the first place (loved the scene in the car after the final shootout where Crockett is forced to handcuff Isabella) and as a whole the film just seems to flow better. I'm not a huge fan of the boat race, but that's more because I love the original beginning for it's harshness.

...still the Nonpoint cover of In The Air Tonight is still quite fucking awful (the build-up to the climatic shootout would've been soooo much better with the Phil Collins original) and I hope I'll never hear another Audioslave song in a Mann film. Poor Mann, what's happened to his taste in music? Earlier Mann films have had such great soundtracks (especially Thief, Heat, Insider and MANHUNTER...gotta love Michel Rubini's "Graham's Theme"), I hope someone points him towards better music for his future projects.

[hangthadj]

I watched this film last weekend and was suprised at how much I liked it. I had only read or heard bad reviews, so my expectations may not have been to high. But in the end I wound up loving it. I am very glad that this thread has been bumped up and I can now see other people enjoyed this as much as me.

I was trying to describe the film to a friend and the best I could come up with was "Hypercolor Antonioni or Antonioni on crack." I guess the crack comment may have been unfortunate. But, throughout the film their were shots that seemed to be straight out of an Antonioni mindset. And the themes of the modern world and pressures of work crashing down and making it impossible to to separate the high pressure lifestyle from what is needed emotionally to create real and sustained human relationships. Maybe it's cause I had just recently watched L'eclisse, but I think I see many similarities in theme and style even.