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Shelf Beauties |
Miami Vice You can feel this disaster
coming in the air tonight. OH LORD!
What’s wrong with this Miami Vice?
No alligator. No
Phil Collins. No
cool clothes. No awesome theme song. No tension. No
interest. It all
leads to No Waffles. Can Crockett and Tubbs bring
down the bad guys? Can
you stay awake
through the whole movie? Writer/director Michael Mann
usually puts out great work, but Miami Vice is his bomb. Steven Spielberg had 1941. Francis Ford Coppola had
Jack. It happens. Everything about the movie
is wrong from the lack of chemistry between Farrell and Foxx to the
flimsy plot
that forces Mann to fill the rest of the movie with several meaningless
scenes
to Farrell’s oddly frosted hair (and 70’s porn star
moustache) to
stereotypical, borderline offensive characters to dialogue and action
that
yield more laughs than thrills. Miami Vice is a bland film that limps along for over two hours or until you
just
can’t take it anymore. It
doesn’t even
inspire you to mock it. The central mystery is
non-existent
without a great deal of detail or twists and turns, so Mann tries to
compensate
with shocking violence (people EXPLODE when shot) and by giving
Crockett and
Tubbs forbidden love interests who are supposed to make them more human
or make
us care more about them as people, but fails to do either. Crockett’s
romance with a drug kingpin’s
right hand woman, Isabella (Gong Li), feels forced and unromantic as
Mann can’t
provide interesting dialogue to bring them together and wrap us up in
the
drama. Even their
sex scenes are
boring! The whole movie needs some
energy and excitement, but lays there like a dead fish.
The television show was revolutionary in the
way it melded music and visuals to capture the attention of a new
generation,
but the movie doesn’t even try to deliver anything close to
that. You would
think Foxx could save it, but even
he and the rest of the cast are too stiff to raise your heart rate. Foxx doesn’t get much
of a
chance to showcase his usual charm and intensity, but it’s
Farrell who walks
away the biggest loser in this movie.
He
finds himself in yet another horrible movie (Alexander, Ask The Dust
and The
New World), but, this time, he doesn’t do anything to make us
feel he was the
shining beacon of hope. His
accent
waivers between Irish and American Southern Good Ole Boy (Is he from Miami Vice can be summed up
by a line from Isabella, “This is past a bad idea.” 0 Waffles (Out Of 4) Copyright 2006 - WaffleMovies.com
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