Miami Vice (2006)
Michael Mann has been making films about men who are very good at dangerous jobs since Thief (1981), and the preoccupations he established there, the professional codes, the neon-drenched urban landscapes, the slow accumulation of pressure before violence arrives, have followed him through everything since. Miami Vice (2006) is, in one sense, a homecoming: Mann created the original television series in 1984, and its glossy, pastel-and-white aesthetic became one of the defining images of that decade. Returning to it more than twenty years later, he stripped away the nostalgia entirely and rebuilt it from the ground up as something grainier, more operational and considerably darker. The result is a film that shares almost nothing with its source material beyond the character names and the South Florida setting.
The film was produced through Mann's own Forward Pass banner alongside Universal Pictures and the German co-production house Motion Picture ETA Produktionsgesellschaft, the latter arrangement a common feature of American studio films of that era seeking to make the budgets work across international financing. Mann wrote the screenplay himself, as he often does, and constructed a story in which undercover Miami vice detectives Crockett and Tubbs are pulled into a federal operation targeting a drug trafficking network, a case that becomes entangled, at considerable personal cost, with their lives outside the job. The tone is closer to procedural than action film, more interested in the texture of undercover work than in setpieces, though Mann is not shy about staging the latter when the moment calls for it. For a companion piece looking at Mann a couple of years earlier, see also Collateral (2004), which shares several of this film's aesthetic instincts and some of its ambitions.
Colin Farrell takes on Sonny Crockett, with Jamie Foxx alongside him as Ricardo Tubbs. The two leads had worked in close proximity on Mann's Collateral (Foxx earned an Academy Award nomination for that film), so there is a pre-existing familiarity between director and cast that might reasonably have been expected to generate chemistry here. Gong Li, one of the most celebrated actresses in Chinese cinema and a regular collaborator with Zhang Yimou through much of the 1990s, plays Isabella, the partner of a major trafficker, whose connection with Crockett becomes the emotional centre of the film. Naomie Harris, then building steadily towards the international profile she would later achieve, plays Trudy Joplin, and John Ortiz takes on the role of the cartel's principal contact.
The most immediately striking thing about Miami Vice is how it looks. Mann shot the film on high-definition digital video rather than film stock, working with Australian cinematographer Dion Beebe, who had won an Academy Award the previous year for his work on Memoirs of a Geisha. The choice to shoot digitally was still a fairly radical one in 2006, and the images Beebe produces have a particular quality to them: grainy in low light, slightly unstable, prone to smearing neon and city glow into long, blurry trails across the frame. It gives the film the texture of surveillance footage more than cinema, which is presumably the point. Night exteriors in Miami and on the water feel genuinely atmospheric rather than dressed, and the Cuban and Haitian sequences have a humidity to them that 35mm might have softened. Composer John Murphy, a frequent Mann collaborator who had also scored 28 Days Later (2002) with Underworld, provides a score that leans heavily on ambient electronics and spare, low-register textures rather than conventional action music. The editing, handled by William Goldenberg and Paul Rubell, cuts to rhythm more than to narrative logic, which suits the film's priorities, though it occasionally works against clarity when the plot most needs it.
On paper, Miami Vice should have been a stone-cold lock for me.
I love a Miami film, I love a crime film, I even love a good buddy-cop double act, and I am usually first in the queue for Colin Farrell. Michael Mann's 2006 update of his own eighties TV show ticks just about every box I own, and somehow it still left me cold.
Farrell and Jamie Foxx play the vice detectives Crockett and Tubbs, sent deep undercover into the drug trade, and it is grittier and rawer than the Rush Hours and Lethal Weapons of this world, which ought to have suited me down to the ground. It did not.
The core problem is that the story is a blank. It is bland, oddly generic for a film with this much attitude, and it never once gives you a reason to lean in. Nor does it help that Colin Farrell, whom I rate highly almost everywhere else, saddles Crockett with one of the worst accents I have heard him attempt, a fresh distraction every time he opens his mouth. What keeps it off the scrapheap is the surface. The cinematography is lovely, all moody digital blues and smeared neon, and the soundtrack is excellent. Mann can conjure a mood like almost nobody else. He just forgot to hang a decent film on it this time.
It is another Michael Mann picture to leave me a touch underwhelmed, after Collateral, and both share that same handsome, glassy surface with not quite enough going on beneath it.
I wanted so much more from this one, given everything it had in its favour, but wanting a thing does not make it so. Two and a half stars, a great-looking, great-sounding misfire that I have to file, reluctantly, under average.
Miami Vice sits in an interesting, slightly uncomfortable position in Mann's catalogue. It is polished but unremarkable as storytelling, genuinely distinctive as a visual and sonic object, and probably more confident in its own vision than its reputation suggests. Whether that confidence is earned is the question at the centre of any honest assessment of it. Fans of Mann's more celebrated work, particularly Heat (1995) or Manhunter (1986), tend to find it a lesser thing, and the box office response at the time, decent rather than enthusiastic, suggests audiences felt something similar. A film that looks like this and sounds like this probably deserved to be remembered a little more fondly than it is. Probably.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2006 | Watched: 2026-09-19
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Miami Vice (2006) on YouTube
Where to watch
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