Miami Vice
Written and directed by Michael Mann
Universal
2006
Rating:


"Miami Vice" may swagger as a tale of two undercover cops living on the edge, but it's ultimately about men of constant sorrow stretched to their physical and emotional limits. Michael Mann has recast the pastel-colored television show of the 1980s (which Mann executive produced) into a neo-noir, using the muscular coarseness of cinematographer Dion Beebe's virtuosic, dreamlike digital cinematography to replace the shadow-steeped black-and-white of noir. The murky aesthetic is appropriate for a movie of moral grays, where the line between cops and robbers is never certain until it's been crossed.

Mann's film traverses in the esteemed realm of Samuel Fuller's gut-wrenching B-movies ("Pickup on South Street"), Jean-Pierre Melville's brutal efficiency ("Le Samouraο," "Army of Shadows"), Sam Peckinpah's sorrowful violence ("The Wild Bunch") and — in a scene that pits the undercover Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) against a drug trafficker (John Ortiz) — Sergio Leone's ability to create unbearable tension and menace out of carefully edited shots of eyes and gestures ("The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"). Mann wrenches visceral violence from Crockett and Tubbs' infiltration of a Cuban cartel while steeping the film in melancholy through the doomed romance between Crockett and Isabella (Gong Li), the kingpin's moll.

"Miami Vice" frequently bursts with violence and sexual energy, but with its final shot of Crockett looking out at an empty jetty, the film haunts as a mournful depiction of loneliness.

Posted Saturday, January 20, 2007

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