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Michael Mann is one of the unsung kings of action filmmaking. Maybe that's because he's only made a small handful of action movies throughout his long career. But when he steps into that arena, it's always worth paying attention to. In 2006, he teamed up with Jamie Foxx ("Collateral") and Colin Farrell ("Minority Report") for a big-screen reboot of an '80s TV show that is a must-watch for fans of the genre.
Streaming now on Prime Video, the "Miami Vice" movie is Mann's ode to hot nights, cold mojitos, and guys being dudes. It's also an impeccably shot, kickass, meditative reinvention of the classic TV series of the same name — one with some truly amazing action set pieces. The movie centers on detectives Ricardo Tubbs (Foxx) and Sonny Crockett (Farrell), who are asked to investigate the brutal murders of two federal agents. They soon find themselves pulled into the alluring and lethal world of drug traffickers.
At the time of its release, critics and audiences were largely dismissive of the movie. It currently holds a lousy 47% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's not at all like "Heat," which brilliantly explores the space between typical crime film shootouts, while also containing one of the greatest shootouts in cinema history. That having been said, the movie's reputation has truly grown over the last 20 years and is far better than its initial reception would suggest.
With all due respect, the "Miami Vice" TV show, which Mann was an executive producer of, is a bit cheesy by modern standards. Mann's movie is anything but. It's stylish, visually spectacular, and surprisingly serious. It makes most direct-to-streaming action movies from the last several years look cheap by comparison, even the expensive ones.
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Miami Vice is an overlooked Michael Mann action gem
"Miami Vice" was anything but cheap, with a budget of at least $135 million. That made its commercial prospects difficult. The movie topped out with just $164 million worldwide and was a major bomb in its day. It has since become appreciated as a true cult favorite. It's a little weird that a blockbuster with a superhero movie budget has gained cult status, but it's true all the same.
Michael Mann has said that he's bored by current action movies. Watching something like "Miami Vice" 20 years removed, it's not hard to see why. In the hands of most other filmmakers, this could have been the worst sort of "IP for the sake of IP" movie that Hollywood makes far too often. In Mann's hands, it became something more impressive, even if it took cinephiles some time to catch up to it.
Colin Farrell doesn't like "Miami Vice," not necessarily because it's a bad movie, but because he feels they didn't totally nail it and because he was drinking a lot at the time. He got sober in 2006, around the time the movie was coming out. He was in the midst of his substance use during production, while Jamie Foxx was coming off of his Oscar win for "Ray." It was a unique intersection of big personalities, a fascinating one with the benefit of hindsight.
Austin Butler and Michael B. Jordan are set to star in a "Miami Vice" reboot for director Joseph Kosinski ("Top Gun: Maverick"). Even though that seems like a winning combination on paper, they've got their work cut out for them when it comes to matching what Mann did back in '06.
You can also grab "Miami Vice" on Blu-ray or DVD from Amazon.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
