Miami Vice (*1/2)

Every director is entitled to at least one major misstep in their career. For my money, this is Michael Mann's. Mann previously directed Heat, The Insider, Collateral, and The Last of the Mohicans. All are great movies. But with Miami Vice, he's lost his magic touch. I think the movie turned me off from the start. Both Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx are exceptional actors, but here, they're stranded in a muddled mess of a plot with nothing but glowers on their faces. See the poster on the left? That's how they look the whole movie. No emotion. Nothing. It's almost like Bad Boys redone with dead seriousness and none of the action or humor. But perhaps most egregious of all is the romantic subplot between Farrell's Crockett, and Gong Li's character. I don't know if you're familiar with Gong Li, but she's a famous Chinese actress who apparently can't speak a lick of understandable English. She's horrible, and whenever she's on screen, the movie is interminably bad. And they devote a whole hour to this romantic subplot. Foxx isn't on the screen at this time, and the movie switches locales from Miami to Havana. Why call the movie Miami Vice in the first place then? This film version has almost nothing to do with the original tv show. It's as if Mann was so concerned with distancing himself from the show, that he ended up distancing the audience from any connection with his film. A missed opportunity from one of America's better directors.