In the Flesh: Miami Vice

Palm trees sway and whisper in the gusting sea breeze. The dark, full and starless, turns soft light hard and shadows stark. Shot with sometimes unnerving fidelity on a Thomson Viper Filmstream, Miami Vice feels like night on the Florida coast, eerie and empty and vast. There is an immediacy to director Michael Mann’s action scenes, a concussive and intimate horror to armor-piercing rounds tearing a car and its driver to rags in the space of three seconds, a clumsily balletic rhythm to the climactic shipyard gunfight with its wild blood spatter and gruesome wound effects. The whole film has the character of a stress dream, hazy afternoons shading into bottomless void, wake spreading over dark water, cocaine strewn in drifts and lines across silvery expanses of mirror. Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s ‘Numb/Encore’ pulses over women writhing in silhouette against coruscating colors.

Mann’s camera swoops and shakes through gunfights and footraces, keeping the action closely tied to the perspectives of his characters. When the camera is still, the scenery is in motion. Water shivers like an aural visualization. Clothes belly and flap against sweating skin. The digital photography shines in this regard, rendering the smallest movements crystal clear, a rare instance in which its uncanny backyard movie quality works for a film’s feel rather than against it. There’s a sense of real griminess in Miami Vice’s nightclubs and bare concrete and glass luxury apartments, a sense of empty spaces occupied by empty people. Undercover vice cops Sonny (Colin Farrell) and Rico (Jaime Foxx) are thinly sketched but compelling protagonists, men driven by simple desires, well-suited for life on the edge of oblivion. 

Their criminal counterparts are likewise laid out with workmanlike proficiency, from Gong Li as cartel financier Isabella to Luis Tosar as the horrifyingly matter-of-fact druglord Arcángel de Jesús Montoya. John Murphy’s score is a remarkable cross-section of 2006’s soundscape. The echoing synthesized beats of Moby’s ‘Anthem’ and ‘One of These Mornings’, King Britt’s ‘New World in My View’, Mogwai’s ‘We’re No Here’ — it feels like a playlist to snort ketamine to more than the soundtrack to an infamously expensive crime flick. It does a lot for that haunted, void-kissed sense of emptiness at the heart of the film, building it out sonically into a truly ghostly ambience. You can see why it bombed in theaters, and you can see why, for all the same reasons, it’s gone on to become a cult classic.