Miami Vice
Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures
Directed by Michael Mann
Screenplay by Michael Mann and Anthony Yerkovich

Miami Vice isn’t a film; it’s a cultural indicator.

This thought came to me as I was making my way off a plane coming home from Las Vegas.  (I was traveling for business, not pleasure, if you must know.)  In flight, I had been scribbling some desultory notes on Michael Mann’s $125 million retread of his 1980’s television series.  As I inched my way to the plane’s exit, I noticed a boy of ten or eleven in a T-shirt bearing the scowling portrait of Al Pacino as Tony Montana, the Cuban-Miami cocaine entrepreneur of Brian De Palma’s lurid Scarface (1983).  Groomed in character, Pacino was wearing his signature white suit and Caesar haircut, a .45 automatic hanging from the end of his right arm.  What kind of parents, I wondered, would allow their son to wear such a shirt?  No sooner had I asked this question than I had my answer.  It was in my notes.  The parents were obviously the kind who flock to films such as Miami Vice with junior in tow when they’re not playing slots in Vegas.

Miami Vice proves once more that, whatever harm contraband intoxicants have inflicted on America at large, they have always been a commercial boon to Hollywood.  Americans are addicted to watching well-dressed criminals and cops buzzing about in fast cars, speedboats, and planes in their complementary efforts of supplying and interdicting the mood-altering substances some Americans crave and others condemn.  The symbiosis between drug merchandising and drug bans has long been documented.  The more we spend on drug policing, the greater the profit margin we inject into the trade.  Since the beginning of the 20th century, we have been forcing the business into the hands of criminals who have taken advantage of their illegal and largely hidden market, inflating their profit margins astronomically.  This, of course, has attracted even more ruthless thugs into the trade, with all the attendant social woes we witness daily.  I have been reading about the drug wars all my life, and one truth seems clear: The more our authorities wage these campaigns, the bigger the illegal drug business becomes.  This might be taken as a sign, should anyone care to read it.  The boys in Hollywood certainly have.  They long ago decided that they would take their cut of our various prohibition-induced rackets.

It all began with the Volstead Act, which made booze illegal from 1919 to 1933.  Without this inspired legislation, we might never have enjoyed the thespian delights of the snarling Edward G. Robinson, the sneering James Cagney, and the growling Humphrey Bogart.

Playing prohibition racketeers in the films of the 30’s and 40’s, these actors established themselves as irresistibly romantic antiheroes outwitting the hopelessly dull cops whose job it was to chase them.  Sure, they got theirs in the end, but their gloriously wild rides to hell seemed to make it all worthwhile.  In Public Enemy (1931), Cagney plays Irish bad boy Tom Powers with all the charm and etiquette of a prowling panther.  He has a swell time dashing about in tailored suits, shooting up uncooperative speakeasies, and pitching woo to Jean Harlow in his careening roadster.  He brooks no complaints against his behavior.  When a tiresome moll refuses to serve him beer for breakfast, he responds by giving her face a grapefruit massage.  The better part of America’s citizenry packed the theaters to spend a couple of hours in the dark identifying with Cagney’s vibrant heedlessness.  True, he winds up wrapped in mummy bandages, tossed like a parcel onto his mom’s doorstep—but, boy, the laughs he has before that final doorbell rings!

Hollywood was quick to learn that gangsters paid at the box office.  Official society, however, began to complain that these swaggering fellows were setting a bad example.  So Hollywood decided to beat the milling forces of censorship to the punch by setting up its own Production Code, the infamous Hays Office, which stipulated, among other things, that films would never depict criminals benefiting from their illegal stunts.  This prompted Warner Brothers to run the following civic-minded announcement just after the opening credits of Public Enemy: “It is the ambition of the authors of ‘The Public Enemy’ to honestly [sic] depict an environment that exists today in a certain strata of American life, rather than glorify the hoodlum or the criminal.”  Then, after Cagney bounces headlong onto his mom’s threadbare hallway carpet, we are subjected to another announcement of virtuous intent: “The END of Tom Powers is the end of every hoodlum.  ‘The Public Enemy’ is not a man, nor is it a character—it is a problem that sooner or later WE, the public, must solve.”

Did the folks at Warner Studios believe they were struggling to solve the Tom Powers problem?  Maybe the expat Brits on the payroll did.  They were all for straightening out the unmannerly micks, yids, and dagos who inhabited that “certain strata” of their adopted country’s life.  But you can be sure the execs in the front office, most of them Jewish and Irish, weren’t troubled by depictions of ethnic misbehavior, not when said depictions put so many fannies in those Bijou seats.

If censorship put the film studios on their mettle in the 30’s and 40’s, television provoked them to even more strenuous feats of hypocrisy starting in the 50’s.  How to give the American living-room audiences that jolt of electric criminality but not get themselves thrown off the air by some bluenose WASP at the FCC?  To meet this challenge, Mann patented an especially felicitous formula.  Make your heroes undercover narcotic detectives!  This way, your good guys get to behave and—even better—look like high-living, drug-using criminals.  Presto, the wonderfully named Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, played by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, stepped into their sockless Gucci loafers and our feckless American culture wearing linen sport coats over silk T-shirts.  For the sake of the law, they indulged in all manner of wickedness—fast cars, diaphanously draped women, and rat-a-tat aggression—all supported by what seemed to be a limitless bankroll and a bottomless weapons cache.  Cool!  Watching the show, you could be a wild cocaine king for 42 guiltless minutes—with time out for Anacin commercials—knowing that, before the fade-out, your heroes would recover their virtue just in time to slap their baddie buddies behind bars.  All the thrills of the headlong life, with none of its legal risks.  You got to snort your coke and impound it, too!

The film version of Miami Vice reworks this good-bad-boy formula, trying desperately to make it look new with Colin Farrell affecting a Don Johnson three-day stubble on his paddy mug and Jamie Foxx squinting himself cross-eyed trying to look tough.  But nothing really works.  Even the film’s flashes of nudity seem stale.  Beautiful babes invade Crockett’s and Tubbs’ showers—in separate scenes, thankfully—but it’s a déjà vu ploy straight out of the weary James Bond films of the 1980’s, more damp than steamy.  I was relieved, however, to learn Mann used a body double for Tubbs’ watery inamorata in deference to the modesty of the film’s costar, British actress Naomie Harris.  This makes every difference, of course.  Chinese actress Gong Li seems not to have had such scruples.  She appears striding womanfully into Farrell’s shower intent on doing her bit to improve Sino-Hibernian relations.

This film isn’t an investigation into drugs; it is a manual for sybaritic living.  All the characters—cops, criminals, and low-level snitches alike—live in chrome-and-marble-appointed abodes, drive BMWs and Lincoln Navigators, and have ample time to wrinkle their beds’ silken sheets whenever the whim takes them.  The only déclassé domicile to make the final cut houses a white-supremacist family that does wet work for a Colombian drug lord.  Their trailer home and army-surplus wear instantly mark them as irredeemable.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a drug gang that has penetrated the FBI’s database and begun murdering federal undercover operatives.  Since one of these operatives was an informant that Crockett and Tubbs had used in their own Miami-Dade investigations, our boys become cross with the feds and insist on taking over their investigation themselves, a demand to which the FBI improbably assents.  In no time at all, Miami’s finest have passed themselves off as drug transporters who exact 15 percent of the gross value of whatever they are moving.  And, don’t you know, despite the innumerable drug merchants working in Florida, they get an assignment from just the man they’re pursuing—the aptly named Colombian drug lord Arcángel de Jesús Montoya.  Piquant joke, no?  Marx would have roared to see Jesus’ angel literally deal dope to the masses.  Gong Li is Jesús’ business manager, and she’s in his funereal SUV when Crockett has a backseat sit-down with the poppy honcho.  No sooner have Dublin and Shanghai met than they’re making eyes at each other.  This, as everyone knows, is rule three in the undercover operative’s manual.  When they meet a second time in Haiti, Crockett asks her out for a mojito.  She knows just the place—a mere 700 miles away in Havana by speedboat.  It’s Cagney and Harlow all over again.  A toss in the sheets, and Crockett’s thinking that maybe he’d like to throw away his stinking badge and settle down with this dragon lady.  Or so it seems.  The plot is so obscure and the dialogue so mumbled that his intentions are never developed clearly.  It might be a plot strand Mann started and then abandoned when he spliced his scenes together, thinking it too unsettling for Americans wearing Al Pacino T-shirts.  Too bad.  An undercover narc being seduced by the wealth and luxury available to those he is pursuing would have injected a welcome dose of realism into this otherwise preposterous twaddle.

But I exaggerate.  Realism does make a belated if inadvertent entrance into the proceedings.  In their role as drug smugglers, Crockett and Tubbs are commissioned to import tons of cocaine into Florida from Haiti.  This is supposed to be exceedingly difficult and dangerous—thus warranting their shoulder-strapped Uzis and their three-million-dollar fee.  Yet they deliver the shipment’s powder-filled plastic bags by plane and boat with less incident from law-enforcement and customs agencies than if they were transporting a wholesale allotment of Dr. Lyon’s Tooth Powder to a pharmaceutical distributor.  This I believed.  It explains what we know of drugs in America today.