Movie versions of hit TV shows are generally hit-or-miss. For every Charlie's Angels (I don't care what you say, that movie was highly entertaining!) there's a The Flintstones. So how does Miami Vice stack up? Is it a Starsky and Hutch or a Dukes of Hazzard? Icey told me as we were going that he thought I was going to rip this movie to shreds, but I was fully prepared to give it a fair go - after all, I did give Underworld: Evolution a six out of 10 (well, 3/5).
Miami Vice is based on the 1980s series of the same name. Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs (Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, respectively), are the leaders of a crack team of Vice squad cops in Miami (natch). While in the middle of some kind of porno bust, they get a call from a former informant, who tells them that an FBI/FDA bust of a drug-smuggling ring is about to go pear-shaped because, after the informant's family got threatened, he spilled all the info he knew...except for their squad. And so Crockett and Tubbs go undercover and are drawn into a world of Colombian drug rings.
Or at least that's what I think the movie was about.
Not to sound conceited or anything, but enough people have told me that I'm rather intelligent for me to think that they may be right. But I wasn't alone in my confusion at what was going on and I went with a bunch of people who averaged two university degrees. In fact, during the movie, Poosy the optom leaned over to me and said "Mally, you're a smart girl. What's going on?" but brainy or not, for the first...ooh, lets say hour...I had no idea and I honestly had to reply, "I have no idea." The reason for the lack of coherence mainly stems from the movie's attempt at authenticity. The initial club scene, yeah it looks like a club and it sounds like a club...but like a club that's playing really loud music, and I can understand that the informant is suitably stressed-out, but I couldn't understand what the characters were saying and therefore had no idea what the relevence of the scene to the rest of the movie was until a while later.
The *problem* of authenticity extends to the acting. Foxx and Farrell seem to be ok in their acting...not that I can tell because the entire script appears to have been written in South Florida/Latino cop-drug jargon, which being a nice girl from Melbourne, I obviously don't speak.
I mean sure, Farrell's accent varies from Deep South to generic American to something unidentifiable, but that made no difference because I didn't know what he was saying anyway. Gong Li, geez I'd forgive Gong Li (left) a lot of things, but what the hell kind of accent was she doing? I understand that there's going to be difficulty because she's a native Mandarin speaker doing English, but Memoirs of a Geisha proved that she could speak the language coherently if kind of heavily accented. But it sounded like she was doing a Chinese-English-Spanish mix. This may have been explained by a scene when she and Farrell go to Cuba and she shows him a photo of her mother and some Latin-looking people and mentions something about Angola (Angola, Africa???) and an establishing shot of a Chinese guy (who looked like John So!) drinking coffee with a Cuban.
On that note, lets look at the cinematography. Like Michael Mann's last movie Collateral, Miami Vice is shot in a mixture of HD digital and that kind of grainy film they use on Cops, so I guess it looks real...but cuts are quick and many scenes are short and unexplained until later in the film. This contributed to the feeling of confusion enough for Icey to lean over to me and Poosy to declare early on that "This movie is shit." There's also a strange bit where it appears that the same sex scene occurs...but with different characters going at it. Really, it was seriously identical shower sex! Having said that, the visuals are quite beautiful in a purely aesthetic sense. And when the violence finally kicks in, it's done wonderfully.
The violence would probably be the sole factor which stops me from giving Vice a score of 1/10.
Judging from the trailers, I was expecting a gun-fest. The reality was that other than a teasing shootout in the first 10 minutes, there was nothing for the bulk of the movie until the last 20 when it gets awesome! There's a brilliant bit when the blonde female of the squad (if we were told her name, I didn't hear it) tells a piece of white trash how she's going to shoot him in the medulla...and then does so. There's a cloud of red expanding on the wall behind him before he just collapses - awesome! I was going to post the youtube clip of it, but couldn't find one. The last shootout between the Vice squad and the Drug Team is also great as they get out their guns (such as the Benelli M4 Super 90 12-gauge shotgun, used by Jamie Foxx - above) and get to ass-kicking. 
The only other good things I can think of are the go-fast boats used in the drug-running (they look fun to ride in), and the cars...although how a cop manages to afford a Ferrari Spider (left) beats me.Poosy has also requested that I make a comment on how Colin Farrell's hair (and styling in general) was really annoying.
Final verdict? Kudos for attempting authenticity, but it just takes itself too seriously. Stick to gunfights.
2-3/10 (and I've been told that this is a generous score)
Now, if I look perplexed, it's because my fringe is actually W-A-A-A-Y over my eyebrows. This photo is somewhat misleading because I went to dinner after this and my friends, especially Nance, went *WHOA!!! Your fringe is short!*
I don't know which part of trim made the girl decide I wanted my hair to be curled and horizontally braided with a rosette kind of formation to hold it in place. I had no idea what on earth she was doing and why. I desperately tried to make eye contact with Poos who studiously avoided looking at me. She said she couldn't because if she did, she would have cracked up laughing. People at dinner said it looked good though, as if I'd made an effort to make myself nice for them.
Aint they cute? Black leather kitten-heeled pumps - with the intention that I stop stealing hers and cease my whining when she trots around the country. 
