Miami Vice
With all respect to every other Hollywood movie I've seen this summer, ``Miami Vice" is the only one that totally seduced me. I have my standards, and Michael Mann's intense reupholstering of his classic 1980s TV show meets a lot of them. The movie is seriously sexy and seriously entertaining.
It's also seriously serious, not the usual result when television is amplified for the movies. ``Miami Vice" is not cult, camp, kitsch, trash, or cheese -- it's not ``Starsky & Hutch" or ``The Brady Bunch Movie." This muscular, point-blank plunge into the drug world is all business, which is not to say there is no pleasure. It abounds, starting with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, who play ``Sonny" Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, the Dade County detectives whom Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas made internationally famous.
Mann has made a career of fierce crime opuses, from 1981's ``Thief" through 2004's ``Collateral." For ``Miami Vice," he's boiled down the television show to its essential dynamics -- the cops versus the cartels -- while globally expanding the parameters of the drug trade.
It seems all anyone remembers now about the show is the menswear. Mann wants to remind us that it was never that shallow. ``Miami Vice" debuted on NBC in 1984, during the Reagan administration's heightened crackdown on drug trafficking, and the show, which Mann created with Anthony Yerkovich (a producer of the film), treated the drug war with a straight face, trying to strike a tasteful balance between a sense of fashion and a feeling of hopelessness. Part of striking that balance was Mann's unique skill at bringing a cinematic sensibility to TV.
The film junks the garish Armani and Versace for a crisper fashion statement: the reflective high-definition digital camerawork by the great Dion Beebe that helped make ``Collateral" seem so unrelentingly dangerous. The movie also ups the show's violent ante. Now the war on drugs looks and sounds like actual war. And where the show took advantage of the Florida sunlight, this film is exquisitely nocturnal. Most of the story unfolds beneath blood-orange dusks and inky skies.
This ``Miami Vice" feels as impressionistically achy as Terrence Malick's ``The Thin Red Line" or ``The New World," or ``Ali," Mann's tremendous kaleidoscope of black America, as framed through a decade of Muhammad Ali's career. Character detail and precise circumstances become elements of the loaded atmosphere. There is no foreground. This is to say that ``Miami Vice" is a serene mood picture as much as it is an action flick.
Mann dispenses with giving hairy Crockett and smooth Tubbs back stories (so the source of Farrell's nutty accent remains a mystery) or many real moments of psychological illumination. These two are their jobs. And in this movie, their day at the office involves going deep undercover to infiltrate an ostensibly Latin American trafficking syndicate with vast international reach. It's hooked up with a vicious white supremacist outfit and has a bold Chinese-Cuban chief financial officer, Isabella (Gong Li), who catches Crockett's eye.
She's already attached to the overlord (Luis Tosar ) running this operation. But there is no love or, for that matter, sex in their arrangement. He makes the money, she launders it. Thank goodness Crockett is on hand to show her what she's missing. They speedboat to Havana for mojitos then merengue vertically and, later, horizontally.
The plot particulars will probably delight the MBAs and heroin czars in the audience. Sadly, I'm neither and found myself adrift on several occasions, trying to figure out the cop argot and dealer jargon, not to mention all the indecipherable accents. But I am able to understand that Gong Li and Colin Farrell are two of the sexiest creatures around.
Because Mann is so good at sculpting shootouts and writing lyrical mano- a- mano exchanges, it's easy to forget how knock-kneed his love scenes can leave you. The encounters between Madeleine Stowe and Daniel Day-Lewis in ``The Last of the Mohicans," for instance, were a hot bonus to all the combat. One of my favorite Mann moments is when Foxx and Jada Pinkett Smith, playing two attracted strangers, head toward the dawn together at the end of ``Collateral." The end of that movie, in so many ways, felt like an absolute beginning.
In ``Miami Vice," the tie between Crockett and Isabella soon tangles into something more ``Casablanca"-like. At some point, Tubbs is forced to say to Crockett, ``She could be a white-collar money manger. She could be true love. But she's with them." Foxx makes that line sound more profound than it probably is. He graces this movie with a philosophical serenity that the series never had.
Watching him I thought a lot about the peeved arias Al Pacino delivered in Mann's ``Heat" and how Foxx is required to do similar barking. But there is humid jazz in his approach that enhances the film's tranquil tone.
In fact, a lot of ``Miami Vice" is sweaty with atmosphere. For every moment of chaos, there are two of calm. The lush South American vistas and sight of cigarette boats zooming along the sea produce a soothing effect; and the sight of Foxx falling asleep, post-coitally, on Naomie Harris, who plays Tubbs's steely girlfriend and fellow cop, is incredibly romantic. As mood maintenance, the soundtrack is uncommonly good, stretching from Patti LaBelle (with Moby ) to Audioslave , a band whose heavy rock dirges prove to be as convincing baby-making music as Luther Vandross's.
Yet the film isn't the panoramic opera of cops, robbers, and their women that ``Heat" was. If the global stakes are higher here, they're less dramatic, too. You wish Mann had come up with more to do for the gallery of great supporting players, which include Barry Shabaka Henley as Lieutenant Castillo, Ciaran Hinds as a craven FBI agent, John Ortiz as a splashy Colombian kingpin, and Elizabeth Rodriguez as the police sharpshooter with the best line in the whole film.
Only in the brutal finale do the characters and the implications of the story's undercover operation come out of the procedural blur, as the backstabbing, fury, doubt, and fear start to wreak their havoc. Those white supremacists return, hell breaks loose, and the suspenseful mayhem leaves a bruise. That kind of visceral authenticity is one of Mann's purest strengths as an artist. Whether you come to this movie for the shootouts or the sex, bring protection.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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