Forget Vegas. In director Michael Mann's newest thriller, Miami is the new Sin City. With typical Mann flair, Miami Vice takes us from the glamorous, sun-soaked Miami beaches to the decrepit hideaways of Colombian drug smugglers and everywhere in between, selling each locale with extra helpings of grit and attitude. Along for the ride are stars Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell, reinventing the iconic characters Rico Tubbs and Sonny Crockett from the 1984 television series, on which Mr. Mann was executive producer.
Mr. Foxx is no stranger to the Mann school of storytelling, having appeared in the director's 2004 film Collateral, yet he and Farrell seem strangely lost here among the palm trees. They strut and preen and speak their lines - what few there are - with gruff authority, but nothing leaves much of an impression. Frustratingly, the potential intrigue surrounding the eminently more watchable Mr. Foxx and his relationship with girlfriend Trudy (Naomie Harris) receives short shrift in favor of painfully extended romps through Havana with Farrell and and a soul-crushingly wooden Gong Li (as drug queen Isabella). In the screening I attended, the pair's supposedly steamy shower scene played to snickers and hollering, surely not what Mr. Mann had in mind (I was bored to tears at that point). 
These issues are largely the fault of the script, also a product of Mr. Mann's imagining, which places far greater emphasis on crafting a believable and exciting version of Miami than on anything so dull as character and plot development. Mr. Mann forgets that Collateral worked so well because the dynamic interplay between Cruise and Foxx always took precedence over the director's dazzling sense of cinematic composition.
The large canvas of Miami and its environs seems to have distracted him here; we spend more time skimming through brilliantly blue water and gawking at Rico and Sonny's Carrera GT — how do they afford such things? — as it zooms down the expressway than examining the "tough" life of a Miami cop.
Article comments
1 - emily johnson
i absolutly luved the movie!