The cocaine cowboys of the 80s are gone, but Miami's Casablanca allure, the undercover cops and the attitudes of Michael Mann's culturally influential television series have been enhanced by time in the feature film version of Miami Vice.
Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) is urbane and dead smart. He lives with Bronx-born intelligence analyst Trudy (Naomie Harris), as they work undercover transporting drug loads into South Florida to identify a group responsible for three murders. Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) - to the untrained eye, his presentation seems unorthodox but procedurally he is sound - is charismatic and flirtatious until, while undercover working with the supplier of the South Florida group, he gets romantically entangled with Isabella (Gong Li), the Chinese-Cuban wife of an arms and drugs trafficker.The best undercover identity is oneself with the volume turned up and restraint unplugged. The intensity of this case pushes Crockett and Tubbs out onto the edge where identity and fabrication become blurred, where cop and player become one-especially for Crockett in his romance with Isabella and for Tubbs in the provocation of an assault on those he loves.
Miami Vice, as a large-scale feature film, liberates what is adult, dangerous and alluring about working deeply undercover... especially when Crockett and Tubbs go to where their badges don't count.
Special Agent Matti
Miami Vice is an average big screen rendition of a small screen phenomenon. You can watch it on the big screen if you want to but the small screen will be just as good.
One thing that they did do well is the relationship between Ricardo Tubbs and Sonny Crockett: the solid/flighty, organised/spur-of-the-moment, steady/excitable, family-man/young-dumb-and-full-of-cum dynamic is good. The rest is an action movie.
MA 15+ (Strong violence)
132 minutes (2:02 hours)
Film: 10 August 2006
