#Miami vice film movie
#Miami vice film full
#Miami vice film professional
#Miami vice film series

#Miami vice film movie

Farrell, however, is a movie star only in the sense that Richard Gephardt is president of the United States. Farrell’s mustache, if not his peculiar accent. Except for something about Crockett’s daddy and the Allman Brothers, which explains Mr. Their new, improved selves, by contrast, travel light and sleek, with no back stories to burden the picture with exposition. Still, the old Crockett and Tubbs, played by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, carried a lot of baggage onto the set: divorces, dead partners, Vietnam, the N.Y.P.D. The movie’s swirl of danger, glamour and professionalism expands the central conceit of the series, which was to imagine a pair of urban cops who looked, dressed and acted like movie stars.Īfter the show became a hit, real movie stars would occasionally swing by for a visit. The action jumps from Paraguay to Haiti, from Colombia to Cuba (impersonated, as usual, by the Dominican Republic), where Crockett and his lady friend drop in for cocktails one evening after work. The actual operating budget for the Miami police department in fiscal year 2005 was around $100 million, a good $50 million less than the reported production costs of “Miami Vice.” The case requires elaborate cover, buckets of money and the finest, fastest air and sea vessels the taxpayers of Miami can afford. There is a basic setup involving white-supremacist methamphetamine dealers that is a red herring and the foreshadowing of a later surprise, but before too long we’re in the familiar world of heartless Latin American drug lords (in this case a retiring fellow played by Luis Tosar) and their sadistic minions (John Ortiz, looking like an especially disgruntled graduate student). Not that the narrative makes too many concessions to realism, apart from the occasional swatch of untranslated law-enforcement jargon (“Our op-sec has been compromised”) and the rumpled, workaday presence of the wonderful Barry Shabaka Henley as Lieutenant Castillo, the down-to-earth commanding officer played on television by Edward James Olmos. Mann frequently uses plot as an excuse to construct ravishing pictures. Dispensing with the convention that the pictures exist to serve the story, Mr. Mann were paying homage to the avant-garde, anti-narrative cinema of Stan Brakhage in the midst of a big studio production. Some of the most captivating sequences have an abstract quality, as if Mr. “Miami Vice” is an action picture for people who dig experimental art films, and vice versa. He fuses music, pulsating color and high drama into something that is occasionally nonsensical and frequently sublime. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle. Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Mr. With “Miami Vice” he clearly had money to burn, and the flames are beautiful to behold. Photographs by Frank Connor/Universal Pictures Risky romantic entanglements: Colin Farrell, as Detective Sonny Crockett, and Gong Li, as the wife of a drug kingpin, in Miami Vice. Credit. Whatever their particular jobs, his major characters tend to be men whose commitment to their professions transcends mere workaholism and becomes an all-consuming, almost operatic passion.

#Miami vice film professional

By the time the final showdown with the bad guys comes around, Crockett and Tubbs have long since crossed the line that divides the professional from the personal.īut in the world of Michael Mann - a guiding creative force behind the small-screen “Miami Vice” and the writer and director of this movie version - no such line really exists. In his spare time Tubbs keeps company with a vice squad co-worker (Naomie Harris), while Crockett pursues a reckless affair with a drug kingpin’s wife and business associate (Gong Li), and these entanglements give the undercover work an extra jolt of intensity. Their private lives don’t take them far from the job.

#Miami vice film full

They impersonate highly skilled, business-minded drug couriers in the interests of bringing down far-reaching criminal enterprises, which means that they must be adept at handling fast boats, suitcases full of cash, small planes and large guns.

#Miami vice film series

Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), the South Florida municipal employees whose labors preoccupy this movie (as they did its predecessor television series two decades ago), have pretty complicated jobs to begin with. IF there is a lesson to be extracted from the visual glories of “Miami Vice” - the painterly compositions of tropical sea and sky, the glowing, throbbing nightclub set pieces, the meticulously choreographed deployments of lethal force - it might be that love and work don’t mix.