Miami Vice (2006)
Directed by Michael Mann
A case involving drug lords and murder in South Florida takes a personal turn for undercover detectives Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs. Unorthodox Crockett gets involved romantically with the Chinese-Cuban wife of a trafficker of arms and drugs, while Tubbs deals with an assault on those he loves.
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30 films that influenced Miami Vice
What critics say influenced Miami Vice
A final comment for film buffs: I don't want to reveal the ending, but let's just say that it is an interesting commentary on changing values in well-made American crime movies in the past 65 years to compare what happens between Colin Farrell and Gong Li at the end of "Miami Vice" with how existential hero Humphrey Bogart treats Mary Astor at the end of "The Maltese Falcon."
From "Thief" and "Manhunter" to TV's "Miami Vice" and "Crime Story," Mann always gets a special look to his thrillers, a drop-dead veneer, a mechanical gleam.
You know you will get high style and hard-bitten romanticism from the man who made "Thief" and "The Last of the Mohicans," and TV's "Miami Vice" and "Crime Stow."
(Adamson, who died in 2008, co-created the series “Crime Story” and wrote for “Miami Vice,” which Mann produced and directed.)
An intense armored car bust, a high-tech bank heist and a series of expertly choreographed face-offs combine to give "Heat" that stylish Michael Mann look ("Miami Vice," "Last of the Mohicans").
Mann captured the essence of Chicago in Thief, and Miami was more a developed character than Crocket and Tubbs ever were on his television hit, Miami Vice.
Even so, Mann--who's also made "Thief" and TV's "Miami Vice"--is definitely one of the premier crime moviemakers around, a worthy noir heir and a hell of a guy with a chase or a gunfight.
Director Michael Mann made his feature debut with this film, and it laid the groundwork for the sleek stylistics later seen in his influential TV series Miami Vice.
Thief is a grungier precursor to Manhunter and the early seasons of "Miami Vice", with Mann spearheading MTV existentialism through the juxtaposition of pulsing ambient music (here provided by synth maestros Tangerine Dream) and noir imagery: rainy alleys, all-night coffee shops, city lights slithering in the black hood of a moving car.
Yet I wasn’t aware of Michael Mann’s involvement in the proceedings until I returned to the movie-reviewing beat and retraced his career, beginning with his feature-film debut in 1981 with the well-acted crime movie Thief, followed in 1986 by the grossly underrated and almost forgotten Manhunter, a film in which Hannibal Lecter appears for the first time, albeit as an imprisoned subsidiary character to William L. Petersen (now the mainstay of TV’s trail-blazing CSI series), who played a tormented detective trying to enter the mind of a serial killer.
From 1981's "Thief" about a professional jewel heist to the raw romantic retelling of James Fennimore Cooper's classic, "Last of the Mohicans," to the grittier crime and political potboilers, "Heat" and "The Insider."
This is a particular shame given how much Mann had proven himself a great director of night scenes throughout his career: Thief with its impressionistic visual poetry, Heat with its dreamy vision of Los Angeles, Collateral, which made the same city look like a blasted hellscape.
Mann made a couple of the best crime dramas of the past 25 years with Thief (1981) and Heat (1995), so nothing prepared me for the abomination that is Miami Vice, which easily replaces The Keep (1983) as Mann's career nadir.
Along the way, he brought something extra to more prestigious genre films like Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Insider (1999) and Ali (2001).
From 1981's "Thief" about a professional jewel heist to the raw romantic retelling of James Fennimore Cooper's classic, "Last of the Mohicans," to the grittier crime and political potboilers, "Heat" and "The Insider."
Michael Mann is a film director of significance ("Last of the Mohicans," "The Insider," "Heat"), but he first became known to the public as the executive producer of the "Miami Vice" TV series, which was a style-setting phenomenon in the mid-1980s.
Though there are some intense action scenes, there's little in "Vice" to match some of Mr. Mann's best work ("Heat", "The Insider") largely due to the fact that the characters are not particularly interesting.
But considering the maturity of works such as Heat and The Insider, and considering the apparently arduous nature of the shoot, you'd expect Miami Vice to carry a little more heft under its belt.
Miami Vice creator Michael Mann (The Insider) returned to the action-movie fray with this 1986 story of an FBI investigator on the trail of a psychotic killer.
With a style that compares to the helmer’s work at the time on “Miami Vice” (as director and exec producer), “Manhunter” is as much about forensics and technique as it is a basic mystery in which an FBI agent (William Petersen) pursues a serial killer (Tom Noonan).
Manhunter was written and directed by Michael Mann, who at that point was known chiefly for his television success with Miami Vice; his previous two features, Thief and The Keep, were non-starters.
I've always found him to be a remarkably repetitive and plodding director: Smothering the soundtrack of the final scenes of his Manhunter (1985) with what appeared to be the entire 17 minutes of Iron Butterfly's "In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida" perfectly sums up his sense of pacing.
Yet I wasn’t aware of Michael Mann’s involvement in the proceedings until I returned to the movie-reviewing beat and retraced his career, beginning with his feature-film debut in 1981 with the well-acted crime movie Thief, followed in 1986 by the grossly underrated and almost forgotten Manhunter, a film in which Hannibal Lecter appears for the first time, albeit as an imprisoned subsidiary character to William L. Petersen (now the mainstay of TV’s trail-blazing CSI series), who played a tormented detective trying to enter the mind of a serial killer.
It is the nature of Mann to favor action and momentum over description and exposition, I have mentioned time and again, and as he has demonstrated several times, most notably in Manhunter and L.A. Takedown , he is absolutely fascinated by the process of law enforcement.
Mann made a couple of the best crime dramas of the past 25 years with Thief (1981) and Heat (1995), so nothing prepared me for the abomination that is Miami Vice, which easily replaces The Keep (1983) as Mann's career nadir.
Michael Mann's career has spanned television and film over four decades and close to forty years ("Miami Vice," "Ali," "The Insider," "Heat," "Last of the Mohicans," "Manhunter," "Thief").
Mann is a director who favors action over exposition, admittedly, but he's also not really a director who tends to dismiss narrative outright; not even the hugely sloppy Miami Vice is quite as much a shambles as this.
Mann, creator of Miami Vice and director of the brilliant 1986 thriller Manhunter, has filtered the characters and events of Cooper's novel through a modern, realistic consciousness.
The Last of the Mohicans boasts superior direction by Mann, former executive producer of Miami Vice.
Mann seems a peculiar choice for directing this film, given his slick, dreamy ouevre (TV's Miami Vice and the films Manhunter, Band of the Hand, and Thief).
Collateral marks Michael Mann's first film since the disappointing Ali, and returns him to the gritty streets of Los Angeles - the scene of his 1995 action masterpiece, Heat.
Along the way, he brought something extra to more prestigious genre films like Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Insider (1999) and Ali (2001).
Michael Mann's ("Ali"/"Heat"/"Collateral") Miami Vice is a slick action thriller that's style over substance, with the meaningless plot involving some kind of muddled series of multiple conspiracies with the likes of the Aryan brotherhood, some Haitian drug dealers and a Colombian drug lord working out of Paraguay with a Chinese Cuban businesswoman.
On the subject of expectations, fans of Michael Mann--and anybody interested in stylish, hard-bitten cinema should be a fan--may expect something on the ambitious level of "The Insider," "Heat" or "Ali."
His subsequent Ali (2001) was a biopic hurt by Mann's lionization of the controversial boxer, and Collateral (2004) was a ridiculously overrated thriller that somehow managed to get critics and audiences to ignore the fact that it was hopelessly contrived.
Ever since Heat, Mann’s films of the past decade — even a finely charted biopic like Ali — have been as much about the creation and sustenance of mood as anything else.
At its best, the picture is like Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye : a story of a world torn apart and reordered under the terms described by the animal logic of pissing contests.
(Don't even ask why Miami vice cops are called in on this!) Once they infiltrate the mob, they discover that the head of the operation (Jon Ortiz, Take the Lead) is only a middleman, and the real brains behind it all are Arcangel de Jesus Montoya (Spanish actor Luis Tosar) and his mistress, Isabella (Gong Li, Memoirs of a Geisha).
The great Chinese star hasn't seemed comfortable in Hollywood fare ("Memoirs of a Geisha"), but Mann locates the lusty vulnerability under her snarl.
Tubbs is given virtually no character-building elements other than his relationship with Trudy Joplin (Naomie Harris), a police intelligence agent; Crockett is meant to be given much more chance to grow and be interesting in his developing infatuation with Isabella (the film's nod to the Mannian theme of men betraying their code of conduct), but unfortunately both Farrell and Li drop the ball on that storyline with fierce abandon: Li because she has clearly learned all of her dialogue phonetically (in the previous year's Memoirs of a Geisha , she was even more stilted and awkward), and Farrell because he... is Colin Farrell, and simply not given to all that many good performances.
With sheer bravado and the approval of Isabella (Gong Li, "Memoirs of a Geisha"), the right hand of the real power behind the throne, Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar, "Mondays in the Sun," "Take My Eyes"), Crockett and Tubbs get into the drug transportation business.
For westerners who may be laying eyes on Li for the first time, as well as for those familiar with her work in major Chinese productions from 1987 ("Red Sorghum") to 2005 ( "Memoirs Of a Geisha" ) a great cinema treat is in store.
This is Mann’s second movie in a row with cinematographer Dion Beebe — he won the Oscar for dazzling, cinema-of-quality 35mm cinematography on Memoirs of a Geisha — who’s breaking the early rules of digital cinematography by exploring the breaks these new cameras make from film, rather than the ways they’re similar.
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They keep trying to act the scenes, paralyzed into blank male-model visages by how little the script is furnishing them, while the surrounding movie makes clear that it isn't any more interested in them than Barry Lyndon was in Ryan O'Neal.
For what it's worth, the many interstitial scenes of Mav riding his motorcycle have that weird eighties neon patina coined by Michael Mann's work on "Miami Vice"--and it's this ineffable quality that dates the thing more quickly than either the chart-topping soundtrack or Kelly McGillis' giant head's giant hairdo.
With sheer bravado and the approval of Isabella (Gong Li, "Memoirs of a Geisha"), the right hand of the real power behind the throne, Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar, "Mondays in the Sun," "Take My Eyes"), Crockett and Tubbs get into the drug transportation business.
With sheer bravado and the approval of Isabella (Gong Li, "Memoirs of a Geisha"), the right hand of the real power behind the throne, Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar, "Mondays in the Sun," "Take My Eyes"), Crockett and Tubbs get into the drug transportation business.
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As ever, it’s worth noting that plenty enough movies have managed to be great without making a bit of sense (The Big Sleep?), and anyhow, anyone who can be bothered to fret about plot when something as delectable as this is unspooling in front of them just shouldn’t be trusted.
Alternately, a film like Olivier Assayas' demonlover opts away from an emphasis on psychology and even torques its own narrative, much like Miami Vice does, but it braces together strong, succinct impressions of its characters as they discover how vast, debased, and media-saturated the world has become.