Miami Vice Review

I was pumped up going to see this. I'm telling you, ever since I heard about this movie, I was 100% psyched to see it. But it let me down plain and simple. It did have good moments though, and I will share those thoughts with you first.

Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx are two pretty good actors. Colin Farrell is the better "actor" in my opinion, but when it comes to playing badasses, it's a toss up. They both played the part well in this movie though. I had this idea in my mind of what they were going to be like from the instant I saw the poster above, and sure enough, I was right. So were their characters too predictable? Maybe, but what I wanted is what I got, and what I wanted was two badass dudes. That part I liked.

The second thing I liked about this movie was the cinematography. It looked to be shot with a portable video camera. Think Cops, but better quality cameras. It was like the guy behind the camera was part of the movie at times. Some shots were grainy, some were real unsteady, and some looked like the camera was out of position. All were intentional of course. I have never seen a movie do this, so it was a little odd at first, but when I got used to it, I loved it. I think this was a fresh new way of filming a movie and I'm all for it.

Somewhat on the camerawork line, some shots in this movie were beautiful. Water, sunsets, jungles, all the transitional shots that panned any landscape were beautiful. Accompanied by a perfect musical score, and these shots were awe-inspiring. The only bad part is, they were meaningless. If only they could have blended the beauty of these shots with some plot, the movie would have been a lot better off.

The last thing I liked was the second hour of the movie. There was a midway point, when an emotionally charged raid happened, and that's when the movie got good. The first hour sucked balls, more on that later. But when this raid happened, stuff started making sense. The narrative became continuous and easier to follow. The guns came out, the emotions came out, and the music came out, and those 3 things really drove the second half of the movie.

To recap, likes: badass lead characters, cinematography, and second hour.

Now, to why I didn't like it. The narrative sucked, the character development was almost nonexistant, the relationship development was terrible, the plot was confusing, and it seemed like meaningless scenes outnumbered meaningful ones.

First of all, the movie began with no credits. It threw us into something and was never explained. I want to think the theater started the movie a few minutes into it on accident, and cause us to miss something, but I'm not sure that was the case. If this was intended, it was very unconventional, which is something Michael Mann, the director, seems to love toying with.

The narrative: Nothing was continuous, nothing made sense, and nothing was there to latch on to for the first hour. There is a point when the audience can fill in the gaps, or will eventually figure something out as the story goes on, but this was beyond that point. It was so choppy and so uninteresting that I don't remember what happened for the first hour. Maybe I'm just not that keen on the whole drug scene, but I'm not sure anybody in that theater tonight was keen enough to pick up on and understand all this stuff they were doing.

The character development: Is it a bad thing when I come out of a movie that's 2 hours long and only remember the names of 2 characters? First names only no less? No, I don't think so. We were rarely introduced to anyone, just flung into their presence, only to leave just as fast. There was little to no character development either. I did not care about any one of these people, and I went in with about a s much knowledge into their lives as I came out with. It's hard to enjoy a character driven movie when you don't know who the hell the characters are.

The relationships: Awful. They tried to develop two major love relationships, one with each main character, and both failed. Jamie Foxx's character was even married, his wife blown out of a trailer home, in a coma on a hospital bed with Foxx alone with her holding her hand, and I just didn't care. They didn't make me care. The only relationship building they did with these two was a pretty unintimate shower scene that lasted about 25 seconds. Colin Farrell's character hooked up with a drug lord's assistant or something, the two of them went to Havana for a few days, fooled around a lot, spent some time together, and yet, when he saves her from gunfire, puts her on a boat and sends her some place safe, and I see them staring into each others' eyes as the boat sails away, her crying, I don't feel a thing. How does that happen? How does relationship development fail so badly? That's one of the cornerstones of every movie, about as frequently pulled off as attempted, but this one fails.

The plot: Someone please explain to me, aside from them being drug lord-busting undercover cops, what this movie was about. There were drugs, there were guns, there was money, and then I'm pretty clueless. Believe me, I tried as hard as I could to get into this movie, but I just never could. Except for the two exceptional sequences, one the emotionally charged raid of a double-wide, and the other the final shootout with some drug dealers, the rest of the plot was really bad.

Finally, the meaningless scenes: It seemed like the took all the scenes in the movie, put them in a hat, shook them around, drew about half of them out, and just kind of put them places. This goes with the lack of continuity, but there seemed to be a huge amount of pointless shots that didn't do anything. Sure there were some badass ones of the two guys and some killer gun-weilding scenes, but they were separated by pointless shots that I can't even explain. They just hurt the continuity so much.

So there you have it. I loved the second hour of this movie. Put it out on DVD, just the second hour, and I'll watch it everyday. I liked the cinematography a lot. I thought it was edgy, and it really helped the few good scenes there were, specifically that raid. Finally, because I'm male, I liked the badass characters and the way they killed a lot of people. I hated to not-even-close-to-continuous narrative, there was no character development, there was no relationship development, so I was left not caring about anybody, I didn't like the plot because it didn't seem to go anywhere, and I didn't like the meaningless shots.

Overall, I would give this movie a 5 out of 10 on the Reganometer, the 5 points being earned solely by the second half of the movie. In terms of go see it or stay home, I would say go, but take pretty low expectations with you. Oh, and a pillow would be nice; that first hour is pretty rough.

This is also posted on my movie blog.