Miami Vice
What I find interesting about movies, other than the fact that 85 percent of them are crap, is that many directors seem to think they still need to sell the film with a flashy title sequence in the first 60 seconds after people have already hired a babysitter, bought tickets, spent $97 at the concession stand, and sat through twenty minutes of theatrical trailers. If Michael Mann ever teaches a class on film making, his first student should be Michael Bay. The former of the two Michaels understands that suspense is not built by nonstop barrages of explosions and PG-13 sex.
“Miami Vice” begins with no bombastic, CG-driven title sequence… not even a static title card. The first scene cuts right into a nightclub, as if we had just departed the climax of “Collateral” at Club Fever and walked straight into this movie. Detectives James “Sonny” Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) are called away from an undercover operation with the Miami-Dade police when an FBI squad gets hit thanks to being fingered by a leak. Their intelligence gathering reveals the Aryan brotherhood is involved. That’s new. Usually it’s a multiple choice between: a) black or hispanic street gangs, b) the Yakuza, or c) La Cosa Nostra. But once in a while, as in the case of Phil Alden Robinson’s “The Sum of All Fears,” you can count on white supremacists to ruin the day.
The early scenes seem rather convoluted, as you try to keep pace with the dialogues that at first don’t make sense. But it reminds me somewhat of David Mamet’s “Spartan” in which the dialogues occur as they naturally would between characters who, between themselves, already have the backstory and you, the viewer, do not. Once it picks up, the tension builds to the end but makes you wait for the action sequences. If there have to be banal shootouts in a film…
Sonny and Rico follow the crumbs to a criminal enterprise that’s more than just a drug trafficking operation. Their entry is a man named Jose Yero (John Ortiz) who they initially believe to be the big cheese of the organization. However, this is a layered operation and they soon discover, noticing military trucks at the dock (there’s always a dock). Yero is just a middle man. Undercover operations are set up in Miami and Port-au-Prince — the base of Arcangel de Jesus Montoya (Luis Tosar), the head of the conglomerate distributor of arms and narcotics, among other things. To complicate matters, Sonny finds himself attracted to Isabella (Gong Li), Montoya’s lead negotiator in the distribution deal.
As has always been the case with Mann, unlike many other directors of even more popular fare, his films do not inadvertently glorify the drug culture. In fact, there’s little to no such “culture” present — save one or two establishing shots of mansions in Florida and Haiti. I mean to say that in the TV series and his similarly-themed films, the stories revolve around the characters and, to a lesser extent, the business they do. Regardless of whether the characters are traffickers of drugs, death or banknotes, these products are only that. It is their business, and not the byproducts of it, that define who they are. This approach to character development makes it possible to have, more often than not, realistic dialogues and situations becuase the characters have varying gradients of morals, and not purely black or white, good or bad.
On the one hand the dialogue in this movie, decidedly less taut than “Heat” and “Collateral”, seems like it’s deliberately crafted to make the story more complicated than it really is, with Foxx and Farrell occasionally stumbling through a line here or there. However, Mann has a gift for that thing we’ve come to stereotype as “gritty drama.” Despite America’s selective memory of the television series, it was unusually ahead of its time with scenes blocked and framed in ways that lent the show a cinematic quality. The complex drama and story arcs were also unlike anything else on television then, and now, which contributed greatly to its success. It’s an unfortunate side effect of a populist culture that the masses only seem to remember the pastel suits, sockless shoes and the car. What really perplexes me, and makes me feel rather old, is that the marketing seems to be geared to an 18-24 demographic — people who weren’t yet born when the TV series first aired!
More than the glacial pace at which the story opens, I was irritated by the quality of the cinematography. Mann used the same high-definition camera system here (the Thomson VIPER FilmStream, for those curious) as in “Collateral.” However, I suspect now that the previous film may have been aided by more artificial light, as the luminance drops so low in some scenes that digital grain becomes extremely apparent in several night shots and then entirely absent in day shots — which is more distracting than if it were grainy throughout. The problem with this is that optical film grain has a much softer appearance to it and can diffuse shots that might otherwise look harsh. With HD, poorly lit shots look even harsher. Generally speaking, digital cinematography can help you push the limits further on just how little light you can film in, but here I think they went over the edge a tad. Push too much and the result is digital grain and washed out black levels.
That being said, I think Michael Mann has created the incarnation of “Miami Vice” that really should have been the definitive image all along. It’s still a shallow story, as there’s little depth to Crockett or Tubbs, or any of the peripheral characters, and Montoya’s operations are hidden entirely from view. But then, on the other hand, how many more scenes of workers in cocaine factories do we need to get the point? Mann as a director does not film people. He films around them, their edges, literally and figuratively. So you have an idea of a person, which is really what you have in life. Unless you’ve lived with a person, you only understand them on a somewhat superficial level that arises from whatever they choose to present of themselves outward. In the context of this film and their roles as undercover investigators, this approach gives us a basis for character conflict when the walls the characters put up around themselves are penetrated.
Is it possible to have relationships that are more than cosmetic when you’re an undercover investigator? How might these relationships be exploited. Again, the film doesn’t get too far into that idea before it descends into explosions, but it does entertain such thoughts. Michael Mann transitions from labored conversations between different agencies negotiating their roles in the transactions with Montoya to a hostage rescue situation slowly enough that you might not even realize the entire tone of the film had been turned on its head.
Miami Vice • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 • Running Time: 125 minutes • MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language and some sexual content. • Distributed by Universal Pictures.