If you know the TV series, you’re not going to recognize the movie…. Essentially the characters have been lifted from the series and it’s set in Miami but it’s very contemporary — more in the vein of Collateral.
- Director of Photography Dion Beebe
The last thing I would have been interested in was just doing a remake…. We’re doing Miami Vice as if there never had been a television series, doing it real.
- Michael Mann
I’m not exactly the world’s greatest detector of bullshit, but even I caught a whiff of fertilizer when Mann & co. were trying to politick their way out of an unsavory association with TV Land in the lead-up to their new film’s release. Amid an enduring fascination with the 1980’s, a slew of TV remakes with questionable popular interest, and a complete DVD and TV-syndication rerelease of the original series, why would Mann, a “serious” enough director in his own right, bother to revive his once wildly popular brainchild in name only?
And, thank Brandon Tartikoff (wherever he is), I was right.
Miami Vice is pure Miami Vice. It’s pure Michael Mann. Keening electric guitars and coolly romantic synths; palm trees and shiny skyscrapers; fast cars, boats, and planes; gratuitous, lengthy, and largely unmotivated love scenes (including not one, but two shower sequences); sinister Colombian drug-lords, oily stool pigeons, and foxy femmes fatales: it’s all here. And most importantly of all, Colin Farrell is pure Don Johnson, right down to the gruff voice, greasy hair, dirty Sanchez, and endless suit-and-wifebeater wardrobe.
I wasn’t a huge fan of Collateral, but it nonetheless revived a long-dormant fascination with the great/”great” action films of the 1980’s, when men were men, mostly hung out with other men, drove fast cars, shot each other without much thought, but nonetheless maintained an oblique code of honor. It’s not hard to attribute at least part of this fascination to a time in my life when 10 o’clock was past my bedtime and Don Johnson was an unsuitable role model.
Fortunately, for all the smoke and mirrors of modern movie marketing, Mann does very little to update his original formula. We can immediately tell the good guys from the bad guys, even if they mostly do the same types of things. Barry Shabaka Henley is just as intense a Castillo as Edward James Olmos, even if he’s unlikely to appear in a ninja outfit. The novelties are few: succinct violence; anal professionalism; no pet alligator; and an inevitably updated soundtrack.
This last point is my one bone to pick with the film (aside from the lack of flamingoes). The music is mostly fine, even great (one can hardly argue with the casting of Mogwai as Jan Hammer), but Mann all too frequently falls back on mid-tempo, mid-volume Rob Thomasesque cheeserock, especially in the clinches. (Is there no modern equivalent of hot sax?) Of course, no Miami Vice film would be complete without Phil Collins, but the payoff is sadly indirect, via a downright blasphemous cover of “In the Air Tonight” over the end credits. Say what you will about the once illustrious Brother Bear composer — Collins was at the top of his game in the ‘80’s, and the original “In the Air Tonight” epitomizes the world of Sonny and Rico, then and now: tense, chilly, violent, and dated in just the right way.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Universal Pictures 35mm print
03 Aug 2006 12:52 PM | Comments (3)
I thought the point of Mann & Co’s protests against audience expectations of retro-settings was to make sure people were not demanding the film match the same asthetics of the TV show. I don’t think Mann ever claimed that the subject matter or basic tone would be altered to any great degree. As far as the music, I’m in total agreement on the awful “In the Air Tonight” cover (and where the hell was the “You Belong to the City” cover?), but I can’t argue with Mann’s recent fondness for Chris Cornell’s voice, since it provides a certain nostaglia for my own adolescence when being a “tortured-young-man” was considered the apex of masculinity (however misguided and immature that might have been).
Certainly it helped to establish that this remake was not to be in the same vein as the Starsky & Hutch remake, but the aesthetic of the film is, I think, quite similar to that of the show. It’s obviously updated — hence the lack of loafers — but there’s very little difference between this and this. The character of Nick the stool pigeon, for example, is straight out of ‘87.
That said, there’s still an enormous amount of camp value in the new film.
This is an incredibly insightful review! Thank you! I just watched the film for about the sixth time, and now it suddenly makes sense to me.
Chiranjit
3 August 2006
12:28 PM
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