Movie Vice

Miami Vice

Directed By Michael Mann

Dealing with Miami Vice-The Movie calls for a new paradigm. This isn't the fashion-setting '80s TV show, yet conceptualizer Michael Mann depends upon that brand-name recognition. Miami Vice-The Movie is a product designed strictly for consumers-not children who love to be told stories, not adults who go to cinema for reflections on life, not pop addicts who groove on art sensation. Miami Vice-The Movie was made for purchase.

Geared to specific demographics, Miami Vice offers a predictable storyline: For the yuppie fantasist, there's a scenic tour of the luxurious, high-wire Caribbean drug world, featuring the pretext of a war on drug led by maverick narcs Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs (Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx). For the urban nihilist, a black female cop (Naomie Harris) is victimized by neo-Nazi bad guys, just to exact easy sympathy, apparently because the actual drug scourge in U.S. communities isn't considered awful enough. For the tasteless geek, there's flashy yet meaningless videography to make Mann's simple-minded, immoral view of the world look cool. Caveat Emptor.

Miami Vice can hardly be discussed the same way real movies are talked about because everything in it goes against film culture. Mann is, essentially, a TV director-a displaced, less serious, Stephen Bochco. He uses Crockett and Tubbs, a sun-belt Starsky and Hutch, to play out his pretentious version of noir-a low-stakes existentialism. In the '80s, this kind of thing made TV critics and film-starved teens drool. ("Holy Hollywood! It's got art direction-plus killing!"). Two decades later, it confirms that TV cliches have trumped film art. And when you read critics bowing down to this kitsch fest, know that they no longer differentiate between cinema and television. The tide has turned. TV swamps all.

Given that Miami Vice-The Movie is made for the TV generations, important questions remain: Is it any good? Does it combine pleasure and insight as art must? The crime story conventions that Mann monotonously repeats bore into the viewer like a Philip Glass drone, a steady flow of armchair crime fantasies. The major plot point, Crockett's compromising love affair with an Asian drug mistress (Gong Li), sleekly oversimplifies his professional ambivalence. Their tryst in Cuba resembles the empty-headed night-flying sequence in Superman Returns, only this is less erotic. (There's more friction when Foxx and Harris' brown skins rub together-a frisson verging on the same hipster/racist delectation as Mann's Ali.)

Twisting every scene into a fanciful etude, Mann keeps dialog minimal while the imagery strains to impress. His panoramas of various cloud formations, nighttime lightning bolts, unending seascapes and distant horizon lines go straight to the heart of banality-unlike Michael Bay's images which, at least, Pop! (Bay's awful Bad Boys 2 is vastly superior.) The longer Mann sky-gazes, the quieter and more portentous the film becomes. The effect is like long, silent passages in a Kubrick movie except nothing interesting happens here. Audiences are jolted out of their kitsch-trance only by amped-up gunshots and explosions.

The consumerist paradigm helps explain why Michael Mann has attained godhead while Walter Hill, a masterful, craftsmanly director, has languished. Hill has an imminently cinematic use of film stock plus a knack for social commentary through genre revision (an aesthetic faith recently kept by Wayne Kramer's Running Scared). But those virtues have been overshadowed by Mann's shrewd commercial gimmickry. He sells his same old toilet paper but with a new ad campaign shot in High-Definition Video. It fulfills the consumerist paradigm to pretend that Mann's use of trendy technology is progress. But the content of Miami Vice is as thin as its fatuous dark imagery. In Dion Beebe's videography, every actor's skin tone goes flat and grays-out. Every scene takes on a distracting, grainy blur. In the good old days of film, we were meant to appreciate the clarity and definition of the photographed world, the luminous face. Mann only wants his expensive toolkit appreciated. He's status-conscious like lowlife Sonny Crockett. What Mann brings to the degradation of cinema isn't exactly chic, it's pretense; he'd make the perfect in-house photographer for a second rate fashion magazine: Rogue.