Netflix Loses Crime Thriller Stinker From Masterful Director

As a child of the 80s, I grew up watching Corcket (Don Johnson) and Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) in the Miami Vice series. It was a classic 80s buddy cop show. So glamorous, so exciting, so fresh. Sadly, about halfway through the film, I had entirely given up on this turning out to be something good, and before the movie had even ended, I walked out and asked for my money back. It’s that bad. 

I don’t know what exactly makes Miami Vice so awful, but it’s likely a combination of factors. Michael Mann, who was a producer on the show, developed it into a movie that he would both write and direct, and it was typically spot-on. He’s directed such greats as The Thief with James Caan, The Last of the Mohicans, which shot Daniel Day-Lewis to stardom, and Heat, which, come on, do I really need to say anything about that masterpiece?

He’s one of those writers/directors who pours his lifeblood into a film he’s making, and each movie typically takes him several years to bring to the screen. 

While the writing for Miami Vice isn’t great, in all honesty, the writing for the show wasn’t great. The movie is like a two-hour and 14-minute expansion on a single episode of the series. Sonny Crocket (Colin Farrell) and Rico Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) find out their informant’s wife has been murdered, and then the informant kills himself.

As it turns out, a Colombian drug cartel is involved. There’s also some Russian involvement. The FBI, the DEA, and ICE all get involved with the Miami-Dade Police Department.

And, of course, it’s up to Crocket and Tubbs to unravel it all, posing as undercover drug smugglers. There’s even way more involved in this storyline, but it’s way too much to get into in a short article about what makes this movie so bad. Suffice it to say it’s partly the fact that there’s way too much going on!

Maybe Mann was trying to condense an entire season of activity into a single movie (big mistake). In any event, he might have been able to pull it off. After all, films like Bad Boys and 48 Hours manage it. But he needed to keep it simple.

He also needed the right actors, and these two are decidedly not it. I love Jamie Foxx as a serious actor (he killed it in Collateral, also by Mann, and, of course, in Ray), but this vehicle is not the right one. He’s trying too hard to be serious in Miami Vice, and it’s just not believable. He delivers his lines almost like they’re supposed to be ironic or satirical. 

Don’t get me started on the almost always fabulous Colin Farrell. Again, Farrell is spectacular in movies like Minority Report, The Gentlemen, and even In Bruges and The Lobster. But in Miami Vice he is playing the supposedly smooth and sauve Crockett like a cheesy soap opera actor who is still trying to get his feet under him. I won’t even bring up the ridiculous salsa dancing scene. 

REVIEW SCORE

I think Miami Vice is just the result of a series of bad choices. The cinematography is tight, the scenes of Miami are gorgeous, and the mood is gritty and dark, but the acting doesn’t fit right, the direction of the actors feels forced, and the storyline is just ridiculous. So, let’s all thank our lucky stars that this movie is leaving Netflix on August 31 and hope we can forget it ever happened.