How does nighttime look in a movie? Do the words darkness, pitch black, or moonlit come to mind? While there are countless ways to style night on film, it’s very rarely an accurate depiction of what we see out our windows. Instead, our nights are grainy and bright. The light from the Exxon station down the block mutes the stars, while the skyline only a few miles away nearly eclipses the moon. Once a world of fear and mystery, now everything exists in view – when the hazy, buzzing lights of humanity’s footprint shine brightest.
This is the world where Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006) lives. Far from the sexy neon washes and warm dusk winds of the seminal 80s TV show (which Mann himself created), this iteration is an incomprehensible vibration of a film. The plot is unintelligible. The ending had to be changed on the fly. The early digital camera work is alien even by today’s standards. One lead fled the country and the other was so coked out that he still doesn’t remember filming the thing. Instead of the buddy cop hit that Universal wanted, Miami Vice exists as one of the most stylish death rattles a major studio has ever released.
I hate to boil a movie down to something so simple, but Miami Vice is a “vibes” movie. It seems built for the explicit purpose of disengaging an audience from its story, leaving them to grasp onto its bizarre visual and audio elements like a life raft. The opening sequence is one of the boldest in recent memory and serves as a litmus test for potential viewers. To quote critic Bilge Ebiri’s essay with Vulture, “The damn thing just starts.” Linkin Park and Jay-Z's baffling banger “Numb/Encore'' blasts through a Miami nightclub. The digital camera work is both grainy and far too close to reality. Detectives Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) and Crockett (Colin Farrell) are working undercover to bust a sex ring. Seconds later, they’re on the rooftop taking phone calls from their informant and the FBI. They drop lingo like “SAC”, “QTH”, and “Ops Sec”. They mention names like Alonzo, Neptune, and Fujima.1 We have no idea who these people are. Minutes later, the pair are already on another case – weaving down a highway in their blue-flame-spitting convertible.
After that, you’re either in or you’re out.
For many seasoned veterans of Schlub Cinema, everything listed above sounds great. Mann is known for his lack of hand-holding the audience — using obtuse jargon, focusing on the minute details of the world, and hiring actual veterans of the field.2 None of Mann’s characters are ever tasked with explaining things to the audience — we’re expected just to keep up. However, Miami Vice doesn’t just shy away from audience questions, it blasts off in a speedboat. The long of it is that Crockett and Tubbs are tasked with infiltrating a transnational drug smuggling operation that is working with the Aryan Brotherhood in Miami. Along the way, Crockett falls for the Kingpin’s lover and partner, Isabella (Gong Li), and the mission comes tumbling down. The short of it is to not worry about any of that, as Mann’s script feels so manic and cut up that it might as well be snorted through a hundred-dollar bill.
So what’s to like about this strange and sweaty movie? No movie is made in a vacuum, and the volatile production of the film adds a captivating texture that couldn't be planned. Foxx, who had recently won an Oscar for his performance in Ray (2004), is absolutely checked out here. His Tubbs is given some painfully out-of-place one-liners and typical action movie fare but is otherwise physically and emotionally absent for most of the film until its grand finale. Since its release, Foxx has been painted as the behind-the-scenes villain by many oral histories.3 These range from questionable accusations of “too much ego” to more concrete incidents, such as Foxx fleeing the set after a security guard shot a man trying to enter the premises. Foxx flew from the Dominican Republic to the United States and refused to return, leading to a total rewrite of the ending. To be fair to Foxx, the set didn’t seem like the most chill place to be. Per Kim Masters’ oral history for Slate, “During one squall associated with Tropical Storm Dennis, Farrell and Foxx drove along the street in a Ferrari with the convertible top down. As they made their way along the block, the windows were blown out of a tall building and glass rained down, damaging the car and just missing the stars.”
If Foxx represents the behind-the-scenes baggage of the film, Farrell is the inexplicable life that crackles off of it. As mentioned above, Farrell has been on the record about how crippling his drug and alcohol addiction was by 2006 – so much so that he immediately checked himself into rehab after filming was done. While I couldn't be happier for how sober life seems to be treating him, the zooted performance he gives here is undeniably great. Drenched with sweat, baggy tan suit flowing in the wind, his hair dripping with grease, Crockett is unhinged. He feels like an animal. A man living through his own end times. His line delivery flips from gravely whispers to pit-bull barks. His black gaze drifts off mid-conversation. And yet…he’s so hot.
Crockett’s steamy romance with Isabella is what centers the entire movie. The alchemy between Farrell’s psychotic energy and Gong Li’s entirely phonetic performance somehow creates gold. In one of the best scenes of the 2000s, Isabella asks Crockett what he likes to drink. “I’m a fiend for mojitos” he snarls back. The pair hop in a “go-fast-boat” and rocket across a sapphire ocean to Cuba. The engine roars. The wind whips their hair. They smile. The music is deafening.
I’m sure executives watched that scene and thought “wow, this is going to be sexy.” Instead, it’s miraculous how un-sexy Miami Vice is.4This world is filled with wet parking lots and industrial light pollution. The skies are constantly overcast and the palm trees bend to the mighty winds. Lightning bolts crash miles in the distance, looming behind our heroes. It’s a decidedly ominous tone for what was sold as a buddy cop remake, giving the apocalyptic impression of a world that’s pulling itself apart. That tone is pushed to the limit by Dion Beebe’s disorienting cinematography. Miami Vice was one of the first major blockbusters to only use digital cameras, allowing for vast depths of field and new ways to film at night. It’s exceedingly hard to describe how this looks on paper, so I’ll let film critic Manohla Dargis explain: “Partly shot using a Viper FilmStream camera, the film shows us a world that seems to stretch on forever, without the standard sense of graphical perspective. When Crockett and Tubbs stand on a Miami roof, it’s as if the world was visible in its entirety, as if all our familiar time-and-space coordinates had dropped away, because they have.”
Director Christopher Nolan is a noted fan of Michael Mann, and his most recent film, Tenet (2020), has been called his Miami Vice. With a muddy plot, stylish suits, and a tone that mixes icy cool with apocalyptic melancholy, it’s easy to see why. One line in Tenet seems especially tailor-made to apply to both films. “Don't try to understand it. Just feel it.” So by the end of Miami Vice, when Crockett is stomping towards the Miami-Dade hospital and the drums of Mogwai’s “Auto Rock” pound so loud that the earth feels like it’s shattering – don’t get hung up on how the Aryan Brotherhood is involved or who José Yero is. Just feel it.
Miami Vice is available to rent from Amazon or Apple TV.
Special thanks to Austin Smoldt-Sáenz, Elena Bruess, Joshua De Lanoit, and Max Seifert.
The character names of this film are another oddity. Why is famed Irish actor Ciarán Hinds playing someone named Fujima? Why is John Hawkes playing a guy named Alonzo?
Mann often brings on real ex-cons, drug dealers, cops, thieves, etc. for the sake of authenticity.
Some reports list that Foxx refused to shoot on speed boats or in planes…which seems like the main thing that was required for this movie.
Michael Mann uses not one, not two, but three Chris Cornell songs to score the sex scenes in Miami Vice.