Why Is Everyone Obsessed With the ‘Miami Vice’ Movie This Week?

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ferrari’ on Hulu, Michael Mann’s Portrait of a Competitive and Conflicted Man

There aren’t that many Michael Mann movies – just a dozen released over the course of 43 years – and plenty of them have some kind of asterisk on them as popular entertainments, whether that has to do with taking an earlier cinematic shot at Hannibal Lecter before The Silence of the Lambs defined him ( Manhunter ), becoming one of the lower-grossing movies of Will Smith’s peak movie-star era ( Ali ), failing to win any of the Oscar categories where it was nominated ( The Insider ), or just flopping real hard ( Blackhat ). Maybe that exacerbates a feeling among hardcore Mann acolytes that they must pick one of his less universally beloved movies to champion alongside classics like Heat and The Last of the Mohicans . In this peculiar unpopularity contest, Miami Vice may be the ultimate winner.

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In the real world, Miami Vice was the first of several high-profile Mann flops, interrupted only by the Depp/Bale buoyancy of Public Enemies , and especially notable because a starry, big-budget version of the popular TV show (which Mann produced) seemed like an easier sell than subsequent Mann pictures like Blackhat and Ferrari . In certain corners of the internet, however, Miami Vice is a quotable, GIF-able, great-soundtrack classic – like Top Gun is for normies, this taciturn, digital-glow Colin Farrell/Jamie Foxx team-up is for haunters of rep houses.

There was an incursion between those two worlds recently, when a film writer and action-cinema enthusiast with a decent social-media following innocuously posted about showing his favorite movie to his girlfriend, at her request. The movie in question was Miami Vice , and boy did a Guggenheim curator with her own social-media following take exception to that for some reason – something about a love for this movie being emblematic of straight-male bad taste. She was lambasted for, among other reasons, targeting (with nothing more than casual ire, but still) a stranger who does not, in fact, identify as straight, and was not exactly displaying any particular aggression by posting his excitement over sharing his favorite movie with a loved one. She then doubled down or tripled down, or tweeted through it, or whatever you call it when someone says they have nothing to apologize for and were within their rights to say what they said (over and over). Which, of course, this person was, just as the original poster was within his rights to say she was being kind of a jerk about his documenting of a nice moment in his relationship.

Why it was so important for her to repeatedly insist that no, actually, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with saying liking Miami Vice means you have straight/male/bad taste remains a mystery. It’s always embarrassing to summarize anything that “happened” on Film Twitter, or any other subsection of Twitter. But it’s sort of neat that this particular online dust-up reverberated into the actual world, in the sense that Miami Vice is now screening this weekend in New York City and Los Angeles. It’s also currently streaming on Netflix for residents of other cities unable to plan their vacations around screenings of a 2006 flop.

This is the kind of strange afterlife Mann films enjoy – extensive, passionate, probably not especially profitable. It would be naïve to assume there isn’t something of a stereotype about Mann’s biggest fans – that they’re dudes who receive his work as kind of spiritually elevated dad movies with impeccable vibes, like if there was a throbbing nightclub where you could also stand up in the back of the room watching the last 40 minutes of a familiar action picture while nodding with faint but perceptible approval. I know this stereotype well, because I am a straight male, and remember my then-girlfriend, now-wife explaining to me halfway through Heat that she was going to need an intermission during which I would procure for her some chocolate.

But despite his surname, Mann isn’t a gender-essentialist filmmaker; plenty of women and queer folks love his vision of masculinity, and even those who don’t aren’t being held hostage. (My wife watched Heat with me because we have always showed each other movies that we like.) In fact, my straight-dude Mann-fan bona fides have never been enough to get me into Miami Vice . My personal Mann outlier is Public Enemies with a side of Blackhat ; Miami Vice has always dwelled with The Keep at the bottom of my rankings.

But hey, it’s on Netflix, so I gave Miami Vice another shot. It remains an unusual use of Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, who play cops undercover to bust a drug trafficking ring, stripped of their Irish musicality and gregarious comic timing, respectively. It’s also a beautiful, weirdly romantic film, where the two main couples – Crockett (Farrell) is paired with criminal-finance advisor Isabella (Gong Li) while Tubbs (Foxx) is already coupled with fellow cop Trudy (Naomie Harris) – constantly take showers together. A not-inconsiderable portion of the movie consists of shots placing Crockett and Isabella in clinches that appear powered by magnetism more than the demands of the case. In Heat , the women must react to the wreckage of cops’ and criminals’ lives; in Public Enemies , John Dillinger has a fleeting romance at the center of his swirling life of crime. The men and women of Miami Vice are deeper in it, which makes everything about their relationships more dangerous.

As a crime thriller, it’s perhaps less effective. The crime movies Mann made before Miami Vice are by turns epically detailed ( Heat ) and ruthlessly streamlined ( Collateral ). Public Enemies , his immediate follow-up, is rich in detail and purposefully low on exposition, abstracting its procedural elements just as the digital cinematography abstracts familiar period settings. Miami Vice feels caught between these approaches: a bigger picture than Collateral , a smaller one than Heat, not as experimental as Public Enemies , and less personality-driven than any of them. A lot film geeks love the tersely quotable dialogue, but there’s something canned about Jamie Foxx flatly intoning that they will “take it to the limit one more time.” It doesn’t exactly ring like Pacino slamming his hand on the table screaming “GIMME ALL YOU GOT!” At the same time, there are some vintage Mann lines here: “You cannot negotiate with gravity,” for one, and Li’s refrain, nicked from a fortune cookie, that “time is luck.”

If the movie still has the lingering reputation of a flop, of an action thriller that only has about two action sequences, that also lends it a mystique that being a slick hit movie based on an old TV show will not gain on its own. (Just ask The A-Team , a movie you just remembered existed.) Showing a loved one a movie like Miami Vice is almost more romantic than catching them up with a bona fide classic, because it’s harder to mistake for quasi-education. This isn’t Michael Mann’s entry in the canon. This is a movie fated to ebb and flow from discourse at the whims of both love and incredulity, not celebrated for its clock landmark anniversaries and attendant rereleases. It’s borderline annoying how much this movie seems to endure, and also a weird miracle. Time, after all, is luck.

Jesse Hassenger ( @rockmarooned ) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com , too.

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