review

i know i know you have forgotten about the pat reviews, but i thought i would start to resurrect them. such a shame that the one i choose to do it with is a bad one.
so i remember really loving "miami vice" as a tv show, and the trailers i saw for the film version had me getting all kind of wet.
oh well it is a fact of life that trailers lie.

does the film have much to recommend it? a few things. gong li is exceptionally attractive. michael mann has once again proved he can film a city in such a way it verges on pornography. he has also managed to film one of the few dance club scenes that works, so credit to him there.

basically the heroes sonny crockett (colin farrell) and ricardo tubbs (jamie foxx) have to go undercover to discover who had snitched on one of their snitches and to find out where the leak is in the fbi's joint agency task force. they do this by becoming shit hot transporters of illicit materials. at first this takes them to jose yero, who everyone thinks is the main man. he is not. they also meet isabella (gong li) and she decides to take them to the main man, arcangel de jesus montoya(luis tosar - who plays bad by being impassive and very short with the words, for all the world he looks bored and that means he is as hard as nails).
there are complications because not only is there a leak. but there is also the ayran brotherhood (of course) (who unlike all the other bad guys in this film live in a trailer park - the rest are in spacious minimalist flats...) just to make it worse crockett decides that he is going to have a fling with isabella. in order to prove how macho he is crockett asks isabella for a drink she eventually agrees if he will take her fro a spin in his go-fast-boat (the sleek fast powerful speed boats that are favoured by smugglers), the bar she wants to go to is cuba. with nary a look at a map sonny hits the accelerator and off he goes.
sonny and isabella have sex. they fall in love. oh no interesting tension. well supposedly.
they get the big job. turns out that the ayran's are working with jose yero (jose double cross... sorry couldn't resist), they kidnap tubbs' love interest, trudy joplin (who just happens to work on the same team as tubbs, so nothing to worry about there).
so the ayran's know what they are carrying, they have kidnapped a love interest and they want the stuff delivered elsewhere. no way jose (sorry again). luckily trudy has given up a vital clue. and a quick scuffle (which has one of the best moments in the film) trudy is rescued and then blown up, but she is still alive. phew.
so crockett and tubbs have the stuff and now are ready to deal.
oh no jose has given up isabella to montoya (who earlier didn't care she was sleeping with crockett, now he does. drug lords are fickle).
all this leads to a big gunfight and the end of the movie.

mann takes great pains to make sure that each flick, click and snap of the cars, guns, boats and planes are fully recorded but when it comes to foxx and farrell he is content to let them mumble and spend moments being inaudible (i am guessing that is what the voice coaches they had were for as it couldn't have been for the accents).
the action is not shot in the way it was in the much superior heat, but it is close in and messy, which might make it realistic it also makes it uninteresting.
sometimes the film quality is no better than video.
the film almost makes no sense.

all in all a bit of a turkey.
more miami mess than miami vice.