Miami Vice
Based on the '80s television series, MIAMI VICE revisits the world of third-world drug running, intersected with billion-dollar corporate industry and examines globalized crime in the 21st Century.
Margaret: 
David: 
Miami Vice
Review by Margaret Pomeranz
Michael Mann, working once again with Australian cinematographer Dion Beebe on high definition digital video, has returned to the scene of his success on television by bringing Miami Vice to the big screen.
DON JOHNSON'S character Sonny Crockett has morphed into (COLIN FARRELL), who, with his partner Ricardo Stubbs (JAMIE FOXX), goes undercover to get those behind a South American drug cartel.
A side trip to Havana for Sonny with one of the heads of the cartel, Isabella, (GONG LI), leads to a bit more than business. In the end, this is just another action film, and there’s plenty of well-staged confrontations.
Colin Farrell is developing into a deeply uninteresting actor, not that Mann’s screenplay gives any of the actors much opportunity for subtlety or depth. Not that Gong Li depends on a screenplay to be absolutely mesmerising. She is so beautiful.
Shooting so much of the film at night on video means that you really notice the graininess, but that’s not so much of a problem.
The real problem is that this is a nothing plot, we’ve seen it many times before, Mann’s inclusion of a couple of extended sex scenes that are not really so sexy is just a diversion.
But that said, Mann is a good director of action so the film has its moments. It’s just when you string them together they don’t add up to much.
Further comments
DAVID: Well, I think at his best he's a great director of action. I think action scenes in films like COLLATERAL and HEAT...
MARGARET: LAST OF THE MOHICANS?
DAVID: ...are amazing. LAST OF THE MOHICANS, too. I think he's really a fine director. And yes, I was a little bit disappointed with this because I was expecting something quite amazing. I was expecting to get blown away by this. And there's a sort of heaviness about the film. Partly the way it looks - that grainy look - because so much of it is filmed at night and it’s as if they’re really pushing to get any kind of image on the screen, and partly because so much of the dialogue is spoken by actors with really impenetrable accents. I mean, Gong Li, as you say, is mesmerising. But it's very difficult sometimes to understand what she's saying.
MARGARET: But they all talk this jargon, you know?
DAVID: That's true. There's a lot of jargon. And the end result is that the plot, such as it is, verges on the incomprehensible. But having said that...
MARGARET: I think they've done it deliberately. They know there's nothing there. They just want to confuse us, the audience. Or snow us.
DAVID: ...But having said that, there are some really great scenes in this.
