On its release in 2006, Michael Mann’s Miami Vice seemed primed to quickly fade from cultural memory. A summer blockbuster with the flavour-of-the-month hook that it was based on a popular 80s TV series, the film was at the time coolly received by audiences and critics, in part owing to how wilfully dissimilar it was from the show that inspired it.
Now, 20 years later, there’s a different picture. Critics have since declared Miami Vice “genius” and a “demented masterwork”, while the fervency of the film’s fandom today rivals that of arguably any movie by the Heat and Collateral film-maker Mann.
It’s taken time to process just what the 2006 Miami Vice was all about. Mann’s film took the basic premise of the Miami Vice series, following the adventures of Miami detectives Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs (played in the film by Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx), then went ruthlessly in its own direction. This wasn’t your daddy’s Miami Vice. Out went the show’s pastels and neon, the shoulder pads and leather holsters. Mann replaced those in the film with shadows and grit, new-age surveillance tech, and sniper rifles that can and do blow a man’s arm off.
This exchange proved jarring for some in 2006. After all, the Miami Vice TV series – on which Mann was an executive producer and show runner – tapped into the zeitgeist so successfully that it had been era-defining. But now, with two decades’ distance from the film’s release, it’s easier to appreciate that Mann made his Miami Vice movie as much a capsule of its time as the TV series was of the Reagan 80s.
It’s not just the flip phones and Linkin Park on the soundtrack that mark the film out as a product of its time. Miami Vice 2006 blasts off in medias res and never spares any time for the kind of buddy cop banter that the show dealt in, while an international drugs trafficking plot has the film spend as much time out in the world – in Haiti, Paraguay, Cuba – as it does in Vice City. It’s Miami Vice for an edgier, more uncompromising, more global post-9/11 world.
That grittier aesthetic is also evident in the film’s fuzzy night-time shots and almost confrontationally detailed human faces – a result of Mann’s decision to shoot the movie with nascent HD cameras. When the film was released, that distinctly digital aesthetic that Mann conjured for his Miami Vice reboot was startling: like cinema with the glamour scrubbed away.
What appeared shockingly new back then, though, looks miraculous today. There are land, sea and air action spectacles captured with seemingly infinite depth of field, lightning-lashed nocturnal cityscapes that are as clear as though they were being seen with the naked eye, and vehicles, people and places all captured in high-definition detail. It can seem like you are experiencing the film – feeling the characters’ emotions, sensing their environments, tasting their mojitos. The effect is intoxicating.
There’s more about Miami Vice which can, admittedly, take a bit longer to process. This is a popcorn flick with at-times impenetrable jargon for dialogue, with lines like “Who runs 250 Mercs off a deep-V hull?” serving only to muddle an otherwise stock narco conspiracy plot. It’s an action thriller with shades of Terrence Malick, where a charged scene can suddenly be interrupted by Farrell’s troubled Lothario staring dreamily off into the endless blue of the Atlantic. It’s also a film that’s as serious as the plague, but one which features a sex scene between Crockett and cartel middle manager Isabella (Gong Li) that’s soundtracked by drawling 00s soft rock and which climaxes with Isabella shedding a single tear, implying Crockett’s so good at it that he can cause women to weep.
A film like that – and there are no other films like that – will always be too kooky for some. Perhaps the recently announced Miami Vice ‘85 – a big screen reboot inspired by the series’ first season and directed by Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski – will be the kind of film that was expected back in 2006: something more straightforwardly entertaining, a more faithful riff on the beloved 80s show. But such is the cult now for Mann’s unique, idiosyncratic fusion of blockbuster and art film that when Miami Vice ’85 comes around in 2028, audiences may well ask: “Why can’t this be more like Miami Vice 2006?”
Miami Vice is available to stream via Binge, Foxtel and Netflix in Australia; via Netflix in the UK; and via Amazon Prime in the US. It’s also available to rent via Apple TV. Find more recommendations of what to stream in Australia here
