In the wake of a slew of campy television-to-film adaptations such as “The Dukes of Hazzard,” “Starsky & Hutch,” and the paramount piece of filmmaking crap “Charlie’s Angels,” the television show “Miami Vice,” with its propensity for pastel shirts, threatened to take the TV-to-film genre further along the road to perdition it finds itself currently barreling down. One can almost hear Jessica Simpson “woo-hooing” as she hangs out of the General Lee.
But if one takes the bling out of the filmmaker and replace McG with Michael Mann, the result is the bizarre world of “Miami Vice:” dark, gritty and decidedly un-pastel.
Colin Farrell as Detective James “Sonny” Crockett and Jamie Foxx as Detective Ricardo Tubbs are two Miami detectives who are asked to take over for the bumbling FBI after a mole outs the Bureau’s undercover narcotics team. Crockett and Tubbs are to infiltrate an international drug-running ring, discover the mole and, if possible, take the drug lords down.
The over-arching plot is simple enough to follow, but the movie gets bogged down by the details. It’s a film one has to see twice to really understand, the problem is that it’s the kind of film one only wants to see one time. The cops and drug dealers spend most of the movie talking on cell phones in cop and drug dealer jargon, setting up deals, changing deals, haggling over how many millions of dollars per kilo in the deals, backstabbing each other over deals, and warning each other about the backstabbing over the haggling over the changing of the deals. There were so many nuances to each drug run it was hard to keep track of it all.
Crockett and Tubbs move from Miami to Colombia to Cuba to Haiti to pick-your-favorite-seedy-Latin-American-locale at such a rate, it’s a wonder they didn’t call the movie “The Amazing Miami Vice Race.” And everywhere they went, they had the fastest, flashiest vehicles to get them from A to Z in no time flat. The Miami-Dade Police Department must have a fleet of Ferraris, Land Rovers, BMWs, power boats, jets and ocean liners lying about for whenever they’re needed, which, according to “Vice,” is often. But there are probably detectives all across the country speeding down the highway in their Ferraris at 130 MPH while they chase a Bentley being driven by a low-level drug informant. It happens all the time, and if it’s being filmed with state-of-the-art digital technology, like “Miami
Vice” was, it becomes all the more believable.
After Crockett and Tubbs break into the drug ring, they soon find themselves deeper in the drug world than any undercover team has ever been. Not bad for a few days’ work. It’s a shame these guys aren’t available to take down Al-Qaida or the War on Terror would be yesterday’s news. Compounding the detectives’ sudden entrance into the high life is Crockett’s interest in the drug boss’ girlfriend/chief financial officer,
Isabella (Gong Li), a Chinese-Cuban beauty whose Spanish is almost as bad as her English. Apparently, all it takes is the lustful gaze of a man with shoulder-length hair plastered to the sides of his head, a Fu Manchu mustache Shawn Miller would be proud of, and a days’ worth of stubble that never quite goes away to get this drug dealing financier into the sack. Farrell hasn’t made it look this easy since he scored Pocahontas in “The New World.”
Outlandish plot aside, the movie sports some serious action
sequences and a kill-shot that rivals anything put on film in
recent memory. While the final shoot-out doesn’t come close to matching Mann’s masterful cops vs. robbers all-out bullet fest in his 1995 film “Heat,” it does bring “Vice” to a thunderous close. While the film has a minor problem with the plot befuddlement, “Miami Vice” is an entertaining enough way to spend two hours. And when “The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning” comes out next year, biting the bullet and popping Crockett and Tubbs into the DVD player will undoubtedly be more fulfilling.