"Miami Vice"

Nostalgic for the pastel-hued '80s TV show? Too bad! This somber action picture bravely defies expectations and gives us something wholly new.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

Photo: Universal Pictures

Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx in "Miami Vice."

July 28, 2006 | A few years back, a screenwriter friend of mine was pitching one of her original screenplays to an agent. The agent loved the script, but informed my friend there was no way she could sell it -- "There's no pre-awareness," she said. When my friend asked what on earth that could possibly mean, the agent explained that the script wasn't based on a TV show, or a book, or an earlier movie -- in other words, it was based on an original idea and not on something that people had already heard of. There was no familiar set of coattails to affix it to. No one would bite.

One of the lessons here is that Hollywood knows exactly what the public wants -- until it doesn't. In the past year, almost every media outlet that covers entertainment has contained a quote from some Hollywood type banging the tragedy gong because box-office figures are down. And they are down, but only from the outrageous highs of 2004. Now the studios are scrambling to give us what they think we want, a problem because not even we know what we want: Hollywood has colonized our expectations to the point where we don't know what we expect anymore. We watch movie trailers and yawn, thinking we've seen it all before -- even when, upon seeing the actual movie, we realize we haven't. Most movie trailers are edited to make the movie they're selling resemble some other movie that found box-office success. Because pre-awareness sells! Except when it doesn't.

The parade of summer-movie concepts over the past few years has been dominated by remakes of TV shows, a kind of comfort food for modern moviegoers who are nostalgic for all the fun they had watching TV as kids. "Bewitched," "Starsky & Hutch," "The Dukes of Hazzard," the "Mission: Impossible" franchise: "Pre-awareness" guaranteed that these movies would sell themselves, although it didn't mean audiences would actually like them (and in many cases, they didn't). So on the surface, the idea of Michael Mann's directing a movie based on the '80s cop show "Miami Vice," created by Anthony Yerkovich (and executive-produced by Mann), might have been of a piece with these other TV remakes. And yet most moviegoers I know looked at the cast, and the director, and hoped against hope -- and against their experience of previous TV remakes -- that the movie would be good.

"Miami Vice" is good, although perhaps not simply good: This is a fascinating picture, and sometimes a perplexing one, an action picture with a personal sensibility behind it -- it's not just driven by the voices of some unseen marketing committee. The picture is almost nothing like the TV show it's based on. Mann defies nostalgia instead of stroking it: The "Miami Vice" of television was all creamy pastels and sun-drenched vistas, a luxe travel-poster fantasy with just a few sprinkles of danger thrown in. But Mann's movie comes from, and shows us, a very different world. This is a somber action picture, one that understands the thrill of stylish violence but also reckons with the weight and meaning of that violence -- its machismo is laced with regret. The movie's palette is mostly browns, grays and deep-evening blues: Mann and cinematographer Dion Beebe (who also shot Mann's last feature, the astonishing-looking nocturnal odyssey "Collateral") used high-definition cameras to give us colors that sneak up on us, instead of popping out at us. In "Miami Vice," the air feels thick, even when the sun is shining. The camera picks up not just the details of a landscape -- ribbons of nighttime highway lit by the false certainty of headlights, empty lots bordered by sinister-looking warehouses -- but something far more subtle: the feeling that something's always about to happen.

There were times, watching "Miami Vice," when I would peer at the screen, certain that I didn't like what I was seeing; the next minute, I'd find myself compelled to wade deeper into the world Mann had put before me, wanting to know more about its messy secrets. Mann wrote the script, and although the details of the plot are sometimes hard to follow, he does manage to get at the idea of a criminal world as a townscape of overlapping neighborhoods, populated by interlocking chains of middlemen, thugs, informants and bureaucrats. When an informant whom Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) have handed over to the FBI winds up with his cover blown -- he's played, with desperate soulfulness, by John Hawkes of "Deadwood" -- the feds request that the Miami cops step in undercover to continue a Colombian drug sting that's about to go south. Their contact man, José (John Ortiz), is just a front for the kingpin, Montoya (Luis Tosar). And even higher up in the organization than José is Isabella (Gong Li), who expertly handles Montoya's business deals, and who has earned his trust in bed as well.

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