There is an old-fashioned feel to Miami Vice. Not exactly a 1984 feel, when Crockett and Tubbs first sashayed onto the shallow zeitgeist, but something equally musty. It feels like one of those stories you put in a drawer to "ripen" only to take out a couple years later and realize it's still as hard and unpalatable as the day you plucked it off the vine.
Mann's "new" Vice is like that; a bracingly stylish TV episode stretched to feature-film length, with two stifled male leads, a handful of stock baddies, and one too many shower-sex scenes. In fact, in the opening shot of the first shower sequence I thought it was Sonny stepping into the steam with Tubbs. No such luck, although methinks this would have been a logical progression.
Doubtless Mann, in spite of his operatic probing of the criminality inherent in crime fighting and vice versa, is uninterested in pursuing a more deviant logic. Fair enough. What he has explored and so memorably, from Thief (1981) to Collateral ( (2004), is an urban male action hero one step away from becoming his own worst enemy. Like the brilliant Manhunter (1986), Mann's films are fascinating for exploring the flip side to male alienation and lack of communication: the ability for the hero and the villain to connect on a human level impossible between most "buddies" in normal circumstances. So what's with with the new Vice? Where is the smoldering subtext, one that Mann teased out so well, in the otherwise bland TV series, and which, you could argue, was part and parcel of its pastel-hued allure?
Was it the stars? Although Jamie Foxx travels best when he travels alone, an actor of his caliber should be able to do just about anything with anyone. And Mann's the man to make it happen. He got two of the biggest ids in the biz to share the love in Heat. Ditto Russel Crowe and Pacino with The Insider. So why did Foxx and Farrell, along with their criminal counterparts in Vice, look like mutts facing off in the same battered old cage?
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