TV & Movie Review's

What does Miami vice mean to you? Ferrari's white suits drug runners Learjet's etc etc well in that respect you won't be disappointed with this move. But if you expect a remake of the TV series, then disappointed you are going to be. I never was a lover of the TV show anyway and rented this DVD with not a little trepidation.

The said trepidation was not misplaced, but not for the expected reasons, this movie is not faithful to the TV series. Yes there are fast cars, fast women and the odd white suit but it is more gritty than the series.

Director and writer Michael Mann worked on this movie. He brought us Heat, Ali, and Collateral so as action movies go this has a pretty good pedigree.

The story goes thus Miami Police vice Department's detective team, James Crockett "Sonny" and Ricardo Tubbs, who some how although they aren't apparently bent have access to more money than god, let alone the entire budget of any police department.

In this story, our heroes are about to break up a crime ring when they get a call from a an ex informant telling them that there is something bigger than he can handle going down and he asks them to look after his family (at least I think it's was his family). Anyway they rush to catch him on the freeway and tragedy strikes.

The loss of this informant leads them to be assigned to an FBI task force investigating a drug ring that seems to involve all of the worlds criminal gangs. They are all in there Russians, Skinhead Nazis, Colombians etc etc

What is important though is that the FBI task force has a leak that means they are loosing agents in the worst way. Crockett and Tubbs can be trusted to help the Feds as they are not in the FBI, so their mission is to infiltrate the gangs.

This movie is fast passed and it's easy to loose track of the plot, so you need to watch it They don't stop to explain things to the audience. Some of the dialogue is pretty hard to understand but I guess that's the style Mann wanted to achieve. He assumes you have some action movie experience and have not a little understanding of street talk.

The characters know what's going on and it's expected that we will keep up, or I suppose nap for the rest of the movie. I was predicting twists to the story line all of the time in this movie, but none happened. Usually you can guess that the hero's boss will be in on the crime or maybe the girl will get killed etc but no there's none of that in this movie and it made a refreshing change.

The action in Miam Vice is pretty full on and the gunshots wounds etc are made as real as practical without filling the isles with regurgitated pop corn etc. This film is by the way R rated and it needed to be. Some of the realism is a bit sketchy but a man being strangled looses it's appeal if you have to watch it for 3-4 minutes I suppose.

There is a lot of violence in this movie and it's not hidden there is also a fair amount of naughtiness too and not always in the bed room ! Limo's and fast boats are all quiet suitable for that sort of thing.

There are a lot of fast boat scenes in this movie too, I'm somewhat skeptical that a large twin hull racing boat would have enough range to get from Miami to Havana, a quick check on Google earth tells me that that's about 240 miles, maybe I'm being too picky on that one and the story is just more important.

Farrell and Foxx didn't act the parts of the original characters from the TV series and it's all the better for that. They both make a very good stab at it, but some how the story just didn't do it for me. It just wasn't believable enough. As ever I'm not going to tell the whole story here it's up to you to suffer, I mean watch the movie to discover it for yourself.

Rent it if there is nothing else in the shop....