Avis des critiques

The digital photography looks like heartsick surveillance footage. John Murphy's music is a heartbeat. These two undercover cops (Farrell, Foxx) ply their trade with minimal bravado, cool but never trying to be cool. Their every action movie action elicits a reaction, and each instance of gunplay carries consequences of its own. No real heroism in this 21st century To Have and Have Not; just hard work and star-crossed romance.

As cinematic as the movie Miami Vice clearly is—in some ways it's the apotheosis of Mann's pop Antonioni artistry—it's also an exquisite distillation of what made the TV show extraordinary. The movie employs tactics that were no longer formally avant-garde within the vernacular of film in 2006, and certainly not within the widescreen ratio of 2.35:1, but it nevertheless embraces them with an intensity and sincerity worthy of the source.

The film's sense of dread is vast and oppressive; its fleeting moments of freedom—like a go-fast boat ride that rivals the ending of Mann's ownHeat as the all-time best use of Moby in a film—are vividly rendered. I'd be lying if I said that I'm not moved by it.

Michael Mann's 2006 film Miami Vice seems, to this critic's eyes, the realization of that promise [that digital video can create a new kind of image different from celluloid film]... Vice marks an important shift for Hollywood in the digital era for the way it actively engaged with the implications of a technological change most had simply taken for granted, and it does so by both wholly embracing its mode of production and reflecting the consequences of doing so.

In an earlier write up for the series, on MANHUNTER, Sachs mentions experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage in reference to Mann's creation of ambience. And Vishnevetsky refers several times to the abstracting qualities of his mise-en-scene. These traits are most strikingly realized, perhaps, in VICE: somehow Mann has come as close as one can to making an abstract, avant-garde film in the guise of a Hollywood genre movie.

Late in Miami Vice, preparing for the climax, Jaime Foxx's Ricardo Tubbs asks his partner, Colin Farrell's Sonny Crockett, "So, fabricated identity, and what's really up, collapses [sic] into one frame—you ready for that on this one?" Sure enough, that's what the whole movie is about: intersections across invisible boundaries. And that's what film is: an invisible collapse of the ineluctable present's invisible boundaries.

The greatest contemporary American filmmaker proves once again his ability to bend the logic of the blockbuster (Miami Vice was thus oversold) to his personal universe, to the extent that occasionally one has the impression of a brilliant re-routing of money in favour of a radical work that does not give up its author's formal and stylistic ambitions.

So A.O. Scott compared this to Brakhage. He's not entirely crazy to do so; there are a few moments that could pass for milliseconds of his work. But other parts are more like high-tech Kenneth Anger (especially the two shower scenes, yellow and blue light glinting off water like sparks), and actually a lot of it resembles the saturated, high-key videography Godard used in the second half of In Praise of Love.

Everything on Mann's resume predicts the exact Miami Vice that he made, which isn't to say that it's his masterpiece. Heat is the better film, but Vice is the messy towel-wringing of all of Mann's thematic, moralistic, and, most importantly, stylistic pet obsessions up to this point. It's such a declaratory explosion that it would seem necessary for the director to take another Last of the Mohicans or Insider-style detour next, as he may have milked moody cop bombast dry, albeit gloriously.

Very few can make $135 million studio investment seem handcrafted in contemporary entertainment; even fewer can make those entertainments seem faintly like art... Michael Mann's one of the few playing this high-stakes game of building a better Babylon to make good. Sex between titans, monumental brooding, death in Dolby — Mann's folly is the best show in town.

Miami Vice is The New World's gangland cousin, a fully formed tone poem - intertwining spirit and eros - about characters trapped (often of their own volition) within a rapidly evolving eternal present. This is something of a change for Mann, whose characters are often trying to outrun the past, only to find it catching violently up with them.

Reviewers dismissing the style as shallow fail to see the experimental essentiality of Mann's deep-focus compositions -- style is here not a template for TV ads, but the air the characters navigate, protecting and entrapping them, through the shadowy labyrinths of undercover sleuthing, love, and life itself.