MIAMI VICE **** (out of ****) Starring Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Gong Li, John Ortiz, Barry Shabaka Henley, Luis Tusar, Naomie Harris, Ciarian Hinds, Elizabeth Rodriguez, and Justin Theroux Directed & written by Michael Mann, based on the television series created by Anthony Yerkovich, with photography and videography by Dion Beebe 2006 146 min  R “This is a bad idea.” “This is way past a bad idea.  We have no future.” [All good, solid dialogue—but then the next line was surprisingly heartbreaking] “Then we have nothing to worry about.” “Miami Vice” is the first big-budget American video epic that knows what video is about.  The work of director Michael Mann (“Heat,” “The Insider,” “Collateral,” “Ali,” “Manhunter,” “Thief,” “The Last of the Mohicans”), it is blurry and grainy, at once gritty and raw yet hauntingly antiseptic, painted in colors so messy that they sometimes bleed into each other.  Even the one obviously fake explosion is fake in the right way, like there really was an explosion but it was too bright and too fast for the camera’s auto-exposure to catch anything besides a runny blue-white pool.  “Miami Vice” captures the paradox of video:  it looks unquestionably less realistic than film, yet—possibly because of its longer history of consumer availablity—we are more prepared to believe what we see on it. I’m sure there were digital effects all over the place—the two speedboats roaring into the harbor in the middle of the night comes to mind—but, unlike movies with cleaner, more conventional looks, they meld with what was around them.  “Miami Vice’s” high-definition video is, finally, video that has little-to-no interest in duplicating film, but video that wants to strike out its own in terms of color, texture, and immediacy.  One scene, shot in a car, features a shot out the window that is obviously a green screen—and, to my delight, in a throwaway bit of fakeness, the green screen shot was at a much lower resolution than the shot inside the car!  Australian-of-South-African-extraction cinematographer Dion Beebe (“Collateral,” “Chicago”) won the Oscar last year for “Memoirs of a Geisha.”  It would be sweet (yet unlikely) to see him up for another this year. So, yes, in its very dirty way, “Miami Vice” is beautiful.  (For the record, I enjoy everything from the most scratchy and blurry 8mm and 16mm all the way to the most polished 70mm, and traditional 35mm in-between.) But on to the actual content of the picture.  “Miami Vice” is the dialogue and characterizations of David Mamet’s “Spartan,” crossed with the hand-held, quick-cutting look of “United 93,” combined seamlessly with a great artist’s eye for compositions and sweeping gestures.  Using a style that shifts effortlessly from documentary realism to doomed romanticism, it follows tough, almost machine-like men speaking in a nigh-incomprehensible lingo that we only intermittently understand, leading them to acts of sudden brutality.  At its most abstracted, “Miami Vice” is men in sharp suits and bullet-proof vests, carrying assault rifles into the drippy grey underbelly of shadows and steel beams that hold up our culture and, once there, risking their lives to blow away other men for causes they aren’t sure they believe in.  The plot will come as a huge, crushing disappointment for those who think movies are about stories.  At once mind-bogglingly complex and yet so very, very simple, not a single “event” in the film is original. The movie begins and ends jarringly, randomly, seemingly in mid-scene.  I hate to quote, but “Miami Vice” achieves a thrilling, bleak existential nihilism that I can’t properly describe.  Walter Chaw at www.filmfreakcentral.net says it pretty well (although even he doesn’t give the film justice): “[D]ark, dank portrait of modern life as a series of compromises against idealism made in the name of male bonding through rites of gun love, violence against brown people, and the steady acquisition of flashy cars and flashier women. If hope is lost, discover cold comfort in hedonism…There’s no fire to the combatants in Mann’s nightmare dreamscape, just a flat-eyed hunger that plays out as the dull thuds of bullets splintering bone and impacting on concrete along industrial waterways; and nights spent in sweaty nightclubs, working out the kinks in walls of anonymous flesh and light. Our earliest glimpse of vice detectives Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs ([Jamie] Foxx) is in just such a strobe-lit box, the two cruising through the insensate bacchanal, meting out violence in short, impersonal bursts and meeting on a rooftop against an impossibly bright, DV panorama to mumble tough words and promises into satellite phones while the rest of the world falls apart…the sex is good but the brutality is better.” And did I mention stuff blows up real, real good?  There are three kills that are so criminally satisfying that you may want to go to confession afterwards.  For a guy who made the first Hannibal Lector movie and has specialized in people getting gunned down in public places, this is Michael Mann’s bloodiest film yet, with violence sometimes bursting out of nowhere, and sometimes being built up for the film’s entire run-time. Some of the criticisms against this film are so stupid they make me sick.  Hardly any of them have to do with the film itself.  “It’s not like the TV show!”  As stupid a complaint as “it changed the book,” but even stupider because, come on, it’s a TV show.  “The clothes aren’t the same as on the TV show!”  Use your brain—the clothes are the same between the TV show and the movie:  the height of fashion.  It’s just that fashion has changed in twenty years.  “It’s too complicated for a summer movie!”  That’s a complaint directed at its release date, not the movie itself.  “It shouldn’t have cost $140 million dollars!”  You never hear someone say “I like this Vermeer, but I would like it more if he hadn’t taken so long to paint it.”  So many movie critics hate the movies.  “Foxx and Farrell didn’t get along during the shooting!”  Um, so what?  “I didn’t know what was going on half the time!”  Actually kind of a legitimate complaint in that it has to do with the movie itself.  But confusion on the part of the audience is as legitimate a mood as exciting or fear.		About the only legitimate criticism is against Foxx and Farrell, and how Mann has written their characters.  But even this is more of a “what if” then a real criticism.  Certainly the movie would be more conventional and more palatable to a mass audience if Foxx and Farrell were wisecracking buddies akin to “Lethal Weapon:”  if they had heart-to-hearts about feelings and gave us an opportunity to know them outside of the confines of their work.  If they finished each other’s sentences, like “Sahara” or “The Way of the Gun” (I know two friends who have known each other for almost twenty-two years and they do not complete one another’s sentences).  But that would be a different movie, using an admittedly enjoyable convention that would undercut “Miami Vice’s” heightened sense of bleakness. What some viewers might find uncomfortable is that we see Crockett the way Tubbs sees him and Tubbs the way Crockett sees him.  The movie is so supremely “in the moment”—perhaps making it Mann’s most consummate film, but that’s an argument for later—that we don’t have the opportunity for seeing “the man in full” as Mann did with Pacino and De Niro in 1995’s “Heat.”  Tubbs and Crockett do not say one single word to each other during the entire film that is not related to their work.  They “see” things but do not talk; in much the same way that “Miami Vice” is ultimately a silent movie because about 80% of the dialogue doesn’t make sense anyway, these are men who know only by seeing.  Tubbs is having an affair with a woman on their vice team (Naomie Harris); she wanders down from the bedroom while Tubbs and Crockett are incoherently mumbling over business.  She and Crockett see one another, and she has to force a greeting out of Crockett.  Crockett has seen the relationship and that’s enough for him. This is how straight men who work together act.  It is the “buddy cop” scenario completely stripped of any homo-eroticism.  These men put their lives in each other’s hands but probably don’t know if the other’s parents are still married or even alive.  I want to call them two Val Kilmers from “Spartan,” but that’s not entirely accurate.  These men are more desperate, more vulnerable, more hungry.  And once Farrell started to work those massive eyebrows and swing around that greasy hair I had to fan my poor wife.  Even if he does look like he smells bad.  Even if (in the words of another woman who saw the movie with us) he always looks like he needs to take a shower, even when he’s taking a shower. Colin Farrell is the thinking director’s action hero, made for movies like this, who conveys coiled, almost feral energy and introverted circumspection in very few words.  The dichotomy between him and Tom Cruise was one of the surprisingly human interests in “Minority Report,” and his equally brilliant turn in “The New World” was that of an adventurer being forced to consider.  As for Jamie Foxx, I think he says less than Farrell (although it’s hard to tell), but he’s more like a presence in “Vice,” a fiery-eyed bullet with a devilish goatee; if he snaps, he snaps much harder than Farrell. For all its minimalism, the movie does have splashes of humor at the right time.  (“We went to Havana.”  “Havana, Cuba?”  “No, Havana, Louisiana.”)  The supporting cast is magnificent, especially the great and powerful Gong Li (“2046,” “Memoirs of a Geisha,” “Raise the Red Lantern”) as the kingpin’s moll/business consultant.  She embodies trampled morality amidst an insoluble world overrun with nice things.  As the villains, Luis Tosar as the man pulling the strings is menacing if nothing new, while his right-hand (John Ortiz of “The Opportunists”) is all the more interesting because, for all his sadism, he’s surprisingly vulnerable.  (Audiences who prefer their villains two-dimensional and wholly evil will be disappointed.) The vice team is given no introduction and says little, although Elizabeth Rodriguez looks great and gets in some choice dialogue, and that dark-haired skinny guy who will drive you crazy with how familiar he is—that’s Justin Theroux, the director from “Mulholland Drive.”  Special mention should be made of pock-faced Barry Shabaka Henley (“Collateral,” “The Terminal”), who’s rapidly becoming one of those actors I love seeing anywhere.  He plays the role of the lieutenant, which is of course nothing besides a type.  But, like everyone else, life is breathed into that which we thought we knew, and the weariness he brings to the line “you’d better be fucking right” is awesome. Some of the loveliest images from the film’s trailer have, sadly, not been incorporated into the final release, including the beautiful formation of speedboats (“go-fast boats” in vice jargon) or the breathtaking tracking shot of Crockett’s Ferrari tearing through an empty Miami at night, too fast even for the camera to keep up.  But fear not; the special DVD edition of “Heat” has a reported eleven deleted scenes.  The eventual “Miami Vice” DVD should run as long.
			You know what?  I give up.  I can’t describe why “Miami Vice” is great.  That’s why this review is so long.  The movie creates an ambient, self-contained universe with its own language, its own rules, its own look, and its own aura of grandiose fatalism.  It is a mood piece, very much like the films of Terrence Malick (“The New World,” “Days of Heaven,” “The Thin Red Line”) and Malick movies are larger than their ideas.  To say “this is what the film means” is to shrink it to make it less threatening, less gigantic.  “Miami Vice” carved a blue place of loss and beauty in my mind, next to the sun-lit green place of loss that is “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and the black-and-white “things could have been different” of “Raging Bull.” It’s fascinating to track Michael Mann’s career.  “Manhunter” back in 1986 is probably his most formal picture, composed almost entirely of tightly-controlled cameras getting perfectly centered figures to move through artificially sterile environs, often in long shots and long takes.  Famously (or infamously), a “prison” exterior is actually the exterior of a museum.  Two decades later we come to “Miami Vice” and “Collateral,” with their DV blurs and jitters and quick edits.  Mann has loosened the reigns considerably in that time, but he retains a distinctive look.  I’d place “Miami Vice” ahead of “Collateral” and “Manhunter” but behind “Heat” and “The Insider.”  If it’s a masterpiece, it’s a shallow masterpiece.  But it’s also so very, very money. Finished Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 Copyright © 2006 Friday & Saturday Night