Click to watch

Miami Vice

I’d have to go back to the Tom Cruise racing vehicle Days of Thunder for a movie so drunk on its own machismo as this, Michael Mann’s adaptation of the TV series that sent America into a frenzy of pastel colors and unstructured jackets in the mid 1980s. Mann was billed as the executive producer of the series, but on the basis of his work as the writer and director of this feature he can’t have been much of a guiding light: None of the show’s virtues are to be found in this posing, humorless bullet fest. It’s especially disappointing because even if he had a different take on the characters of Crockett and Tubbs, Mann’s work in films has generally been consistently intelligent. This is nothing but hack work, albeit buffed to a glossy Hollywood sheen. And while there’s no law that says actors in this kind of remake have to resemble their predecessors, there are limits: Whoever thought that Colin Farrell was an adequate stand-in for Don Johnson was probably also responsible for the mullet haircut he wears throughout the film. Thank god there’s no chance this will affect 2006 fashions the way the show did 20 years ago.