I'm watching "Miami Vice," Michael Mann's unsettlingly disappointing epic of trashy decadence, misdirected artistry, misspent millions, overwrought complexity and underwrought performances by some of the film world's finest character actors and two almost superstars who have never been so bad. There is greatness in this movie's outline. You can see it in the rough edged visual flavor Mann jams into every shot - how the film shifts from color-corrected black and white to glossy Florida neon, delicately, perfectly. You can feel it in the Miami skyline - Michael Mann loves him his midnight lit-up cityscapes. The lightning striking, the music lifting. There's a subplot that comes out of nowhere and feels like it lasts an hour where Gong Li takes Colin Farrell to Cuba for drinking, dancing, genuine old-fashioned lovemaking. Mann wants to have it both ways - make a hard-edged crime flick sans humor and 80s gloss, yet he also wants to make a modern romance epic, capturing every aspect of modern crime (smugglers and crackheads and club kids dancing to Jay-Z/Linkin Park mash-ups).
It's a rare kind of bad movie. The kind that might be a good movie, someday, when the world shifts a couple inches towards crazy.
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