Miami Without the Pastels

By Richard Schickel

There are some very pretty images in Miami Vice: a sporty little airplane flirting with a massive bank of clouds; down angles on speedboats cutting wide, frothy wakes through the water; almost any moment the camera concentrates on Gong Li or Naomie Harris.

But on the whole, the director, Michael Mann (who also wrote the screenplay), is in a grittier mood than he was in the days when Vice was a sensational TV presence. And he does not have a taste here for the muted tones that made Collateral so seductive in 2004. He's more in the dark-of-night Heat mode. He uses high-definition (HD) digital cameras, since HD imparts more visual information than film stock, especially in low light. In terms of cinematography, Mann may embody the future of large-scale commercial movies.

It must be said, however, that Mann the writer is perhaps a little too taken with detail. Basically, his undercover-cop duo (Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell) are pretending to be high-level, freelance drug smugglers making a deal with a Hispanic cartel that does not think small, and in the first part of his film Mann dawdles them through a labyrinth that's not conventionally menacing. Foxx and Farrell don't have a lot to do in those passages, which permits us to spend plenty of time with Li, who plays the criminal gang's enigmatic financial whiz, and that time is scarcely wasted. Mann never explains why she has fallen into bad company instead of rising to the top on Wall Street, and that makes her more attractive to Farrell--and to us.

There's nothing mysterious about Harris, playing Foxx's cop lover. She's brave and tough minded, and her fate is what finally energizes the movie's concluding chapter. Mann is good at action, especially when it comes to surprises--the sudden blossoming of blood behind a gunned-down bad guy, the mighty explosion that we aren't expecting.

It's probably fair to say that Mann's detailing of the final sequences is, in its way, of a piece with the careful way he introduces his many characters and lays out his plotlines in the movie's static beginning. There's obviously a compulsive component to his nature. But he more than rewards our patience when he finally flings himself into action. There is a very firm sense of screen geography when the guns start flashing, no careless frenzy in his staging, only a sort of deadly logic. It's a quality that's always in short supply when crime movies commence winding down. And it's worth waiting for in Miami Vice.