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Last Updated: May 30th, 2008 - 11:49:13 |
Director Michael Mann is no fool.
In “Miami Vice” he gives us the requisite action, violence-that-makes-you-go-damn, sex and neurotic characters that have become the staple of police dramas. His feature-length film is based on the iconic, hit television series of the same name that helped give the 1980’s its sheen of sleek decadence and superficiality.
More than twenty years after the start of the TV series, the new “Miami Vice” film is not styled with art deco, tropical pastels or prettyboy cops—that is, not unless you think Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell are pretty in that 80’s Don Johnson, Philip Michael Thomas sort of way. This “Miami Vice” is roughed up for the new millennium and for the big screen.
Well, it’s as roughed up as any drug flick is. While the story does build to a crescendo, you have to sit through some fairly disjointed and sometimes inaudible early scenes to get to the meat. From scene one, we watch Foxx as Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs and Farrell as James “Sonny” Crockett chase various lowlifes living the highlife—pimps, drug dealers and their lackeys. It is an intro of quick hits and slice-and-dice editing that gives just-OK dialogue and plot the illusion of depth.
After a while, the narrative finally settles down and we understand what the story is all about. Tubbs and Crockett will go deep under cover to try and crack a drug ring responsible for the death of one of their favorite sources. Their case takes them to Colombia, to Havana and even to a trailer park near Miami Airport. As we endure the typical suspense about whether the under cover will be uncovered, Foxx and Farrell are talented enough to make us care about them but must rely on the requisite scenes of violence, explosions and quick death to drive the story forward.
It is a story, in the best tradition of drug flicks, about lifestyles of the rich and criminal. Foxx gives this film some flava but this is not a Black movie. More so than in the TV series, where Don Johnson was the star, the Tubbs-Crockett team here have a bit more parity but, still, Farrell is the one involved in the film’s major love triangle (and the one who gets to chase strange and have hot sex, while Foxx’s love-making is relegated to the realm of jokes and warm and fuzzies.) Of course, Tubbs and Crockett are always in a fresh vehicle and, like the old duo, are even seen here at some point wearing fresh suits and shoes.
It’s all here minus, for me, some sense of whether it all matters. Just as the 1980’s sheen and decadence is a distant memory after the savings and loan scandal, collapse of junk bonds, the devastation of crack cocaine in our neighborhoods and two Gulf wars, the internecine battles between the super-rich who sell drugs and the super-unfunded police who fight them seems somewhat passé.
To its credit, this story does hint at a more global aspect of drug trafficking and the fact that, today, the world is a lot more complex than 20 years ago.
Esther Iverem’s latest book of poems, Living in Babylon, is available at www.Amazon.com
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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