Mann is in quite a predicament with “Miami Vice” a remake of his hit show from the eighties. He created a show that was ahead of its time, a gritty realistic show about two cops in the underground, years subsequent to the shows success and ending, over a thousand imitations popped up in film, television, and novels, and the formula became old. The sad state of Mann’s adaptation of his own work is that “Miami Vice” was edgy in its time, but these days we’ve had so many gritty cop flicks with a black and white officer partnership, that the concept presented here is just tired and feels simply like a vehicle for its two stars.
After seeing Mann’s film “Heat”, and being a fan of it for a long time, “Miami Vice” just ends up feeling lightweight and pointless. And while I’m never averse to Mann’s work, this remake just feels like a vain attempt to market on a past endeavor when Mann doesn’t need it. “Miami Vice” is a misstep on every level, from casting, script, and its incredibly predictable story that really never paves any new steps, it just follows the same path of past drug law enforcement thrillers that we’ve seen on late night cable. Tubbs and Crocket are gritty very serious law enforcement agents that have to go deep underground to corrupt a drug circuit involving white supremacists—z-z-z-z-z.
Oh sorry, well let’s just say that a lot of developments occur including romances with the two men and their women folk, a stand off, a climactic gun battle, and a lot of snooze inducing love scenes. “Miami Vice” is boring. It’s painfully boring. It’s so boring I nearly fell asleep an hour into it. And what’s worse is that everyone in the cast looks incredibly bored, doing nothing but staggering around and murmuring lines, while Foxx and Farrell simply have no chemistry or interplay. The film takes itself very seriously, even more seriously than Mann’s “Heat”, and that brings the film to a sleepy atmosphere.
Mann eagerly attempts grit and realism from beginning to end, and fails miserably. There’s no life to this, and underneath the sleepy expressions of our entire cast is a sluggish cliché tale of officers fighting drug traffickers, and getting “in too deep”. It’s sadly just more of the same, when I expect more from Mann. I used to love the series of “Miami Vice” because Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas had chemistry, charisma, and seemed to work well together; well, Mann should have quit while he was ahead. His remake of his own property is dull, cliché, routine, and pointless.