I’ve seen Miami Vice more times than any other film made this century. Indifferently received during its 2006 release, the film has emerged as a major touchstone for my generation of critics. If you’re young and you’re writing seriously about the medium, there’s a good chance that you’re a Miami Vice fan.
Why? The movie—a continuation/reimagining of Anthony Yerkovich’s poppy, pastel-hued cop show—seems an unlikely candidate for the cinephile canon. Its plot occupies traditional cop-movie territory. Its soundtrack is compulsively un-cool: Nonpoint, Moby, Audioslave. It features gratuitous product placement. Its costuming consists almost entirely of ugly mid-2000s club looks, like shiny Ozwald Boateng suits and un-tucked extra-large button-up shirts.
And yet Miami Vice looks and moves like no other movie. It was shot in large part on grainy handheld digital video, which lends the action a sense of immediacy. Though its technology has become outdated, Miami Vice still feels new and different. The camera is squirrelly, quickly darting from close-up to close-up; the visual compositions are off-kilter, dominated by big swaths of negative space—looming skies, big empty rooms, water that stretches out past the horizon.
Then there’s the atmosphere. The movie opens and ends seemingly mid-scene; there is no set-up and no sense of resolution. The tone is doomy; writer-director Michael Mann—who executive-produced the TV series—refashions leads Tubbs and Crockett (Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell) into weary professionals. The world they inhabit is murky and fatalistic; everything matters only insofar as it continues the flow of information (for the police) or the flow of cash (for the criminals). It’s a movie about drug dealers that features no drugs and a movie about cops that features no arrests. Its characters exist within an endless cycle of informants and moles, takedowns and retributions, seizures and countermeasures.
Mann makes movies about archetypes—duty-bound criminals, driven investigators, flamboyant bank robbers, champion athletes—who long for independence. At its core, Miami Vice is a doomed romance about two people—Crockett and a cartel higher-up (Gong Li)—who see each other as escape routes. The film’s sense of dread is vast and oppressive; its fleeting moments of freedom—like a go-fast boat ride that rivals the ending of Mann’s own Heat as the all-time best use of Moby in a film—are vividly rendered. I’d be lying if I said that I’m not moved by it.
