Film: From 1984 until the spring of 1990, the TV series "Miami Vice" was an absolute street sweeper. For 111 episodes, fans around the world watched the cases of Detective James "Sonny" Crockett, who lived on a houseboat with his alligator Elvis, and Detective Ricardo "Rico" Tubbs, a former New York cop. Together, the two brought law and order to the Florida drug scene and made their actors, Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, world stars. With high-profile guest stars from music (including Frank Zappa, Phil Collins and Miles Davis) and film (Bruce Willis, Viggo Mortensen), Jan Hammer's theme as simple as it was ingenious, and a look that was very defining for the 80s, "Miami Vice" soon dominated not only television, but also the music charts and the fashion world. Now the series has been revived for the cinema by director Michael Mann ("Collateral"), who was executive producer on the show at the time.
For those who loved the series, let me say right off the bat: except for the title and the names of the protagonists, Mann's cinema version has little to nothing in common with its TV role model. While the series was rather colorful, garish and sometimes quite amusing, the cinema version does completely without the legendary pastel colors, is dark, dirty and offers only very rarely humorous relief. The film's story, on the other hand, is - in keeping with the TV series - relatively simple in itself: after a failed deal costs the lives of one of their informants, his family and three FBI agents, "Sonny" Crockett (Colin Farrell) and "Rico" Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) go undercover themselves to convict a powerful drug dealer. But it quickly becomes apparent that there is a much more powerful, dangerous adversary pulling the strings in the background. The two cops are now no longer satisfied with the small fish, but set it as their goal to put a stop to the big boss.
Although the basically very simple plot is unnecessarily complicated by too many mostly only touched subplots and characters, it can at least be claimed that "Miami Vice" has become an all-around successful thing visually. Except, perhaps, for the look given to Colin Farrell. This looks like a bad conglomerate of the 70s (nasty porn beard) and 80s (long shaggy mane and BOSS suits) and will take some getting used to, especially for female fans of the actor. But all in all the pictures, which Mann captured with high-resolution HD cameras as he did in "Collateral", are simply fantastic, fascinating and beautiful and testify to the high qualities of the director. There is probably no other filmmaker who knows so well how to capture the beauty of a big city like Miami at night and to put this in sharp contrast to the brutality of the crimes that such a city produces.
What ultimately hurts Michael Mann's very well-crafted film enormously is the associations its title will trigger in most viewers. Yet everything that might be associated with "Miami Vice" Mann seems to deliberately avoid. For instance, there is hardly any action, which, with a running time of well over two hours, may well try the patience of some viewers excessively. It's only in the last twenty minutes that Mann releases the handbrake, which had been pulled tight until then, and delivers a thoroughly effective shootout to his viewers. But until that happens, the thriller with its dialogue-heavy, leisurely and somewhat too serious staging completely eludes the viewing habits of today's cinema audience. In addition, especially the main actors seem to struggle through the dialogue scenes completely underwhelmed and sometimes even unmotivated and offer little of the quality that one may expect per se from Jamie Foxx and also Colin Farrell.
Only those who manage to free themselves from all comparisons to the cult series and engage with Michael Mann's narrative style will be able to recognize the undoubtedly existing - but sometimes too well hidden - qualities of the film. For such viewers, then, the flick is well worth watching, despite its flaws!
Image: Here lies the DVD's great strength. Cool, clear colours, strong contrasts and excellent sharpness of detail result in a very good overall picture, which is only very rarely disturbed by slight double contours. Very good.
Sound: The sound of the DVD can also convince. Especially in the action sequences a high spatiality is achieved. Also the dialogues come understandably mixed to the validity, so that there can be also here only one possible total judgement: Very good!
Extras: While "Miami Vice" in the U.S. immediately as a (better) directors cut with some extras more (eg audio commentary by the director and additional Behind the Scenes featurettes), German fans have to make do with a much slimmed down version. As bonus material, only two short featurettes and a music video for the cover version of "In the Air tonight" are offered here. "Miami & Next: Outside Shoots" goes into detail about the filming in the Dominican Republic and Miami in just under 10 minutes, while "Miami Vice Undercover" (approx. 13 min.) is devoted to the work of undercover cops. Both featurettes are good and informative, but overall far too short to actually feed the viewer in-depth information. In comparison, all the featurettes on the US DVD add up to a running time of just under 1 hour and thus offer a lot more information. Let's hope that these extras will eventually find their way onto a German release.
Conclusion: "Miami Vice" is not a bad film, but suffers from the associations that the film title conjures up in the viewer. If these are rather satisfied in the slightly tighter cut and with a little more action refined Directors Cut of the US DVD, the Code 2 DVD comes up only with the theatrical version and slimmed down extras, with the missing audio commentary weighs particularly heavily. Technically, the disc is perfectly satisfactory, which is why the DVD is thoroughly recommended for fans of stylish thrillers.
Original title: Miami Vice
Director: Michael Mann
Number of discs: 1
Languages: English, German, Italian (Dolby Digital 5.1)
Subtitles: German, Turkish, Italian
Image Format: 16:9 (2.40:1)
Extras: 2 featurettes, music video
FSK: age 16+
Length: approx. 126 min.
Regional Code: 2
Ein Artikel von Frankfurt-Tipp
