WaffleMovies.com


 

Back Shelf Beauties
by Willie Waffle

Click Here to Buy Movie Posters!
Click Here to Buy
Movie Posters!

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.

Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) are two Miami detectives who turned over one of their top informants to the FBI, only to find out someone has infiltrated the Feds to blackmail the informant and kill FBI agents who were working undercover.  Now, the head of the federal task force, Fujima (Ciaran Hinds), needs Crockett and Tubbs to go undercover as drug runners to find the leak, but what they discover is a multinational drug ring involving the Colombians, White Supremacists and more.  

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 Southern Ireland?  Is Belfast in the Bayou of Ireland?), while his passion level rarely rises to corpse level.  If you believe the stories, he and Foxx were partying very hard throughout the marathon shoot, and Farrell went to drug and alcohol rehab not too soon after the movie wrapped, so you have to wonder how much that impacted their performances (and, I hope Colin will continue to stay strong and stay off drugs.  He’s a good actor who seems to be a good human being who deserves a second chance and a clean life).     

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

You can support this site by shopping at AllPosters.com Click here to buy posters!