Miami Vice

Review by: Doc

There are long scenes that seem included just to lengthen the film with what appear to be outtakes for music videos...
I was really looking forward to this film. I was a fan of Miami Vice. I even owned the soundtrack to play in my OR when I was a resident. Unfortunately, Michael Mann, in this “updated recreation” of his own TV classic, forgot to bring the style, the music, and the cool, not to mention Huggy Bear.


The movie centers around Crockett and Tubbs, Miami undercover detectives who live the lives of drug traffickers to take down the bad guys. When the family of one of their informants is killed in a blown FBI operation, they are put on the trail of the ultimate drug kingpin. The movie spends a great deal of time in situations that emphasize how big, bad, and organized Archangel de Jesus Montoya really is. Unfortunately, he belongs to the “Haldol haze’ school of acting. I guess the blank stare is supposed to imply desperate madness. It seemed more like post-traumatic stress disorder to me.


Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx do a good job as the lead narcs but just never seem to project the cool and menace of the originals, Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas. Johnson seemed to be more threatening just taking his .45 out and laying it on the arm of a chair than Farrell ever seems here with his growling and his mullet.


There are long scenes that seem included just to lengthen the film with what appear to be outtakes for music videos. When the plot or action do manage to intrude, they are actually pretty good, and the climactic gunfight is one of the best I’ve ever seen, in true Saving Private Ryan at Normandy mode.


Although not what it might have been, or what those of us who lived through the original hoped, this movie holds some good moments which seem to overbalance the bad. I’ll be generous and go with 2 ½ of 5 scalpels and a mildly disappointed phalanx up.



Doc Hollywood.

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