The "Man" returns. American filmmaking master Michael Mann is here to bring us a fucking rarity in Hollywood. Not a cop action movie, but a cop DRAMA with action. Especially a very-hard R-rated $135 million summer blockbuster picture.
Filming in digital, Mann revives his noted 1980s TV series to the new millenium, where new people fill in the shoes of some characters, but now in the visual and attitude spectrum of Mann's beloved HEAT and recent critical and financial hit COLLATERAL.
Mann's screenplay doesn't have the dramatic intensity or epic scope of HEAT, nor the intense one-night thriller/drama of COLLATERAL, but if anything it feels like a 2-hour special episode of VICE, if it was made in 2006 instead of the mid-1980s. The story feels episodic, that being our duo of Sonny Crockett and "Rico" Tubbs(Farrell and Foxx) going undercover against a middle-man drug runner who was behind the murder of some people they knew, and as well explore a leak within the intra-agency task force of the FBI, DEA, ATF, etc.
Mann has to play a careful game of trying to export his crime autuership to that of obvious commercial fare. He can't be too moody, or the midwest will instead go see PIRATES 2 again, nor can he too un-Mann, for his film buff fans will turn on him. For the most part, he succeeds, but who will get the most out of MIAMI VICE?
Obviously, me and several people at BB.Net are big Mann fans, and I'm sure his admirers will dig the hell out of VICE. Technical people will marvel at the sure-to-be Oscar nominated digital-shot cinematography(how many days does good ole film have left?), but Michael Bay zombie-like fans will be pissy that the hero cops aren't flashy videogame rejects, or that there isn't a real substantial difference in this dangerous world of police in their never-ending war on drugs made compared to the the situation in the beginning of the story.
As a native of Miami, Mann has in limited sequences given the special glow, good and bad of this sunny paradise of an urban metro-city, which make up for Bay's silly juvenile nonsense with BAD BOYS and its $155 million-costing sequel(and no, I fucking have no idea where THAT budget went to).
At the end of the movie, cynics will see shots in this film that indicates an opening for a sequel. I really doubt it(and considering's the movie's box-office intake so far, it aint happening), for like the real men and women who work for law enforcement for Miami-Dade, it is a brutal, depressing job(much as Mann explored in HEAT) where the dividends is the hope that maybe they made the world a little better by taking out a few more scumbags. Besides, as VICE obviously pointed out, one case, one day at a time.
