Of Vice and Mann

Heat of the night: Detective Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell, right) and Detective Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) work undercover in the Michael Mann film, Miami Vice. Photo Frank Connell. Courtesy Universal Pictures.

The lights are out in Miami. In fact, someone appears to have switched off the sun, which may be why it’s hard to spot a pet crocodile, or a bikini babe or a flamingo, all recurring characters on the original ‘80s TV series Miami Vice, and nowhere to be seen in the movie version. The latter is the original’s broodier, greasier cousin, linked to its seminal past only by leads “Sonny” Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, fashionable undercover vice-squad cops, who are really just two good guys nibbling the fruits of the bad life.

The release of Miami Vice, the film, brings fans full circle: the series was a minor revolution because it was so unusually cinematic, with its self-serious, intricate underworld plot lines and best-selling soundtracks. (Now, television is all music with the show crammed in between tracks — hello, Laguna Beach — but back in the St. Elsewhere days, drama with flash and cross-promotion felt radical.) Director Michael Mann shaped the TV series from creator Anthony Yerkovich’s clay. He has since built a notable film career sourcing and expanding Miami Vice’s distinct, moneyed iridescence in movies like Heat and Collateral, and now returns to the original. But what’s surprising given the relative freedoms of filmmaking — and by freedoms I mean bigger toys — is that Mann doesn’t inflate; he mutes. The new Miami Vice, updated to the present but with time-travel cameos from blazers and stubble, is strangely quiet. Scene after scene is set against a darkened city skyline pricked by lightning flashes foretelling a storm that never quite arrives.

For all the astonishing fly-over scenery and a few truly gut-twisting action sequences, the film never quite arrives, either. Even Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) seem a little overworked and underwhelmed, treading that line between cool and fatigued. And no wonder: they’re probably jet lagged from globe-trotting between Haiti, Colombia, Cuba and Miami to infiltrate a drug ring led by Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar), a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a Salman Rushdie beard who makes threats like: “My best weeshes to your families.” The cocaine lord puts our boys in bed with the Aryan Nations (a nonsensical sidebar), as well as a volatile sycophant (John Ortiz) who doesn’t like the way Crockett dances with Isabella (Gong Li), the boss’s girlfriend and the drug operation’s CFO.

I didn’t like the dancing much, either — she’s a bit stiff in the hips — but it’s not their biggest problem. Chinese superstar Gong Li, who is so beautiful that the rest of us should just get burkas, is not comfortable enough working in English to add expression to her line readings. It makes a courtship that should feel dangerous and sexy — he suggests mojitos; she takes him to Havana in a speedboat marked Mojo — simply confusing. Did she just say she likes him, or did she say she has a tree in her wallet?

Crimes of passion: Crockett tempts fate when he becomes involved with Isabella (Gong Li), the Chinese-Cuban wife of an arms and drug trafficker. Photo Frank Connell. Courtesy Universal Pictures.

Understandably, Crockett isn’t too interested in mere chit-chat, and he finds himself tempted by the luxury benefits of being bad and beautiful. The new Crockett is a little more tortured than Don Johnson ever could be — as is Farrell’s professional predilection — and it works. Farrell has an anti-Tom Cruise quality here, his face beaten down and newly older, free of a younger actor’s twitches and mannerisms. He also appears entirely without vanity, wearing sweat-soaked shirts and hair that vacillates between glue-smeared greasy and twig-pile dry. When Isabella and Crockett step into the shower, she should have said: “Deep conditioning time!” Then again, maybe she did.

Both Crockett and Tubbs get a shower scene with a beautiful woman, and the sex is adult and imperative, an echo of the breezy, entitled quality that made the TV series delicious. The shallow pleasures shelled out so generously in the original Miami Vice were its raison d’etre. What a gas to watch these dandy cops flirting with the underworld, scarfing down all its perks, yet somehow, just barely, maintaining their integrity.

Similarly, the film works best when gliding across the water towards Mojito-ville, revelling in the fantasy of the upside of sin. But with the exception of a couple of fabulous, ill-gotten houses, almost every set in the movie is dirty and broken, almost post-apocalyptic. Yes, this is what the drug world really looks like, but I miss the delusion, the glamour. Perhaps if the original hadn’t set up expectations, the unyielding grit wouldn’t have felt like such a letdown. Which raises the question: If there are almost no similarities to the alpha Miami Vice, why bother remaking it at all? Why not lose the blazers and start from scratch? Of course, the idea of a winking, ironic Wedding Singer-style Miami Vice — we are spared any ankle shots to determine sock status — is much worse. And on its own terms, this Miami Vice has some great moments, particularly an artful climactic shootout with falling bullets that sound like rain on a tin roof.

But for a buddy movie, there’s little camaraderie. These two notoriously intense actors are so internally focused that they barely talk to each other. Instead, the music kicks in to fill the silence, and it’s as contemporary as the Pointer Sisters et. al. were 20 years ago: a lot of that constipated Nickelback sound, plus some Moby and a lingering instrumental soundtrack (devoid of Jan Hammer’s famous “keytar”). Mann’s gift for sheer energy pushes us through the muck, but while the style is fabulous, the fun is minimal. Two decades later, this is what Michael Mann has wrought: the Miami Vice-ification of Miami Vice.

Miami Vice opens July 28.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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