Miami Vice

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Summary:
Two undercover cops in Miami live the high life as they try to conquer drug smugglers.

Review:
Can you say, "BORING?" Well, if you watch this movie you'll certainly be able to.

Why was Gong Li cast as Isabella? She's CHINESE. Her English fucking SUCKS, and oh yeah, her Spanish sucks, too! When did her Chinese background become important in any way? Oh, it wasn't. What the FUCK, man? Colin Farrell was, well, Farrell but with longer hair and the standard 5 O'clock shadow. Jamie Foxx was alright, but then again, this movie isn't, so no one really stands out in this movie.
Michael Mann is a damned competent director, but it seems like he spent the last couple years watching Tony Scott's latest "accomplishments" with Man on Fire and Domino, because the cinematography relies on shaky, novice-like jitteries with extreme closeups that lack composition and clarity. It does nothing to engross me in the goings-ons of the movie. I've given my digital camcorder to Vietnamese people who've never touched one in their lives, running around aimlessly with no idea of how to zoom, nor do they understand about backlighting and motion sickness do a better job than this movie's done.
The plot is pretty typical, with not much in the originality department. When it came time for a shootout, the volume is pushed up 30 notches, probably to try to wake up the audience. Oh, and does Mann love Audioslave or what? MAN!

The attempt of Miami Vice was to be gritty and effective. Yeah, sure it's gritty, but if you film a movie with digital cameras in very high speed at night, you will ALWAYS get a 'gritty' setting. What's more important is making sure that you do shit right in every OTHER way to help pull the viewer into the movie.
I laughed when a dude jumped into an oncoming semi, and thought it was clever not showing him get hit, and there was no extreme noise that went with the hit. Instead, there's a streak of blood under the truck as it drives by, with a shoe doing small somersaults on the asphalt. The only time where I really felt the movie was interesting in some ways was during the shootouts. I couldn't see half the time what was going on, but I liked how they just shot the shit out of the baddies with hardly a second thought. However, the worst moment of the whole movie was when a dude was holding the trigger to a bomb threatening to blow everyone up, and he's like, "You can't kill me before I pull this trigger!" And then one of the coppers says, "No, what's going to happen is I am going to fire this weapon at twenty seven hundred feet per second, striking your blah blah blah, which will do this, causing that to happen, and then this..." SHUT the fuck UP, bitch! This whole time there's a shootout that DOESN'T rely on having outrageous Hollywoodizations between the shooters, and then we have someone telling the killer exactly what's going to happen in a long-assed undending run-on sentence that is nothing but a glamorized bit of dialogue to make the viewer say "Ho, SHIT, man that shit is BADASS!" Fuck no, that's bullshit.

When I wasn't really bored, it must have been while I was watching one of the four shootouts during the movie. Otherwise, everyone's talking barely above a whisper and trying to move drugs and stuff. Or, there are also superfluous sex scenes that make me laugh out loud because of the shitty music in the background.

I don't recommend this borefest.

GRADE: D+

Reviewed: 7/29/06