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'Miami Vice': So dark you might get lost

By BOB LONGINO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Miami Vice" on the big screen is not about sun, surf, fashion or Jan Hammer's echoing drum sounds.

And, no, as one of the waning summer's last big movies, "Vice" isn't the action film its marketing plan might suggest.

Universal Pictures

The verdict: Nothing like the TV show; it's grungy like "Collateral," but has less of a story.

Director: Michael Mann
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Gong Li, Naomie Harris, Ciaràn Hinds
Run time: 132 minutes
Release date: July 28, 2006
Rating: R for strong violence, language and some sexual content.
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Grunge aesthetic
Gasp! Is this truly the future of movie photography?

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

This "Miami Vice" is a dark, grainy and heavy drama and so super-serious and smoky thick it could be called "Miasma Vice." For 2 hours-plus, mega-guy stars Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell play cops who dip into illicit drug trading, fire guns, talk tough and have sex with tough-talking women. Then they have more sex.

The film is almost jokeless and at times nearly incomprehensible — even during its bullet-riddled finale.

This "Vice" protrudes from the dank but sometimes effective artistic palette of Michael Mann, whose vision has changed dramatically since he produced TV's totally '80s "Miami Vice" cop show featuring Don Johnson, Philip Michael Thomas and white sportcoats with rotating blue, orange and fuchsia T's.

Visually, this new "Vice" brings to mind the wonderful "Collateral," Mann's filmed-in-dingy-streets and in-your-face drama with Tom Cruise as a soulless hired assassin and Foxx as an Everyman cabdriver trapped in a series of killings.

Come to think of it, Cruise and Foxx might have made a good pairing for "Vice." In "Collateral," both embodied characters who exhibit personality.

For "Vice," however, Mann settled on Farrell to play Sonny Crockett to Foxx's Ricardo Tubbs. The characters come off as one-note personalities, talking to just about everyone as though they're spitting gravel.

The movie opens — at night, of course — in a crowded club that's blaring the Linkin Park-Jay-Z song "Numb/Encore." Crockett and Tubbs appear on the fringes of the dance floor and there's some kind of sting going on involving babes who walk like models. Outside the club, you see a couple of pure-white Range Rovers. Inside, you see Farrell's Crockett toss a C-note to a curvaceous barkeep. He immediately hits on her. Then, Foxx breaks a guy's fingers.

In other words, you're on your own piecing together what's going down.

Later, they're posing as drug transporters and getting deeper into an international operation that requires fast boats, high-flying planes (piloted by he-can-do-everything Tubbs) and dangerous drug negotiating. It's during the latter that Farrell's Crockett meets his eventual squeeze, Gong Li of "Memoirs of a Geisha."

Storywise, Mann seems to like filming without a net, dropping moviegoers into the middle of something and letting them find their own way. It can make a movie like Bryan Singer's "The Usual Suspects" intriguing and gripping. Unfortunately, it sometimes makes "Vice" annoying.

The raggedness of Mann's visuals does work. It keeps you watching, guessing and sometimes wondering why he's being so intentionally sloppy. One such sex scene with Foxx and his "Vice" girlfriend and co-worker (played by Naomie Harris of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest") works well, adding depth to their relationship.

But, since we've brought up sex, we might as well also bring up how, though "Miami Vice" doesn't want to look like any other slick Hollywood production, under all the ragged coating it really is just another Hollywood production.

This film explores sex in the shower (twice), in a bed (three times), on the dance floor (twice) and on the floorboard of a moving car (sorry, just once).

It's also got dialogue that's as ripe as anything in meaningless shoot-'em-up action films like "Bad Boys II."

Farrell, in musing about their jobs, talks about how "guns come out; arrests get made."

Foxx's supposedly meaningful retort: "That's what we do."

For some moviegoers, we suppose, there's nothing wrong with that.