I really like Michael Mann movies, but this movie just didn’t do it for me. I just never bought into it. It was, overall, just a very weak effort by a very good director.
Written by randomfool on January 8th, 2007 with
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The new Miami Vice movie is a mixture of one of my favorite directors: Michael Mann (imdb, Wikipedia) and clearly my favorite TV show from the 80’s. There are pictures of me from the 80’s wearing wayfarers and white pants but enough time has now passed that I am not totally embarassed by it but not proud enough to post them on my website or anything. Anyway, I was somewhat interested in seeing this movie despite the mediocre reviews that it received. Michael Mann produced, wrote and/or directed a number of excellent movies like Heat (one of my all-time favorite movies), The Insider and Collateral.
When the new Miami Vice made it to the top of our NetFlix queue and I had a night to myself, I was looking forward to sitting back and enjoying my new entertainment system. Since I got it in April, I have never really just tried to sit back and enjoy a movie in full surround sound. And, Michael Mann movies are great uses for good home entertainment systems. I love the camera angles, the sound, the music, the explosions, etc. And, while usually longer than the average movies, Michael Mann movies are usually worth the wait. Heat is a great example of that. It’s long and builds up to a very dramatic ending.
The new Miami Vice movie definitely had a high budget, but that’s about it. First of all, I don’t get the whole Colin Farrell (imdb, Wikipedia) thing. I was actually shocked at his credit list because until he made headlines for the sex video, I had never heard of him and I probably don’t need to hear anything more about him. Anyway, he was a totally lame Sonny Crockett. Now, Don Johnson has proven himself in his later years (imdb, Wikipedia) to be kind of a freak show (I never needed to see Nash Bridges, and I can’t recall for sure whether I ever actually watched an episode of it or not, but how embarassing) but he was the original Sonny Crockett. Colin Farrell was neither true to the original nor even close to a legitimate update. Beyond the limitations of Farrell as Crockett, Jamie Foxx (imdb, Wikipedia) wasn’t a very good Tubbs either no matter how good of an actor he might be (understanding that Phillip Michael Thomas has become his own side show).
In the TV show, the characters actually seemed somewhat tortured. In this movie, they pretended to be tortured, but didn’t really seem to have any reason to be. Maybe I am just getting old, but I have an increasingly difficult time suspending disbelief and in this movie, I just never could buy in to the attempted tension. Even the big gun fight at the end (most Michael Mann movies have a big gun fight at some point) was kind of boring, even if the bullets flying around in sourround sound were kind of cool. The film didn’t have much in the way of Michael Mann’s typical cool camera angles and such. I think they just expected you to know all about the TV show story lines and character development and didn’t bother to spend any time bothering with that in the film. Gong Li (imdb, Wikipedia) mumbles a lot and just doesn’t do it for me either. Overall it was just a very weak effort by a very good director and it really kind of bummed me out.
Written by randomfool on January 8th, 2007 with
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