Miami Vice
Directed by Michael Mann
The writer-director Michael Mann spent more than $125 million to make the movie version of his 1980s TV show Miami Vice. Last year’s hurricanes destroyed his sets. His cast and crew were expelled from location shooting in the Dominican Republic. The trials, tribulations, and torments were legion, especially for an intense control freak of a moviemaker like Mann, whose similarly portentous and style-heavy films include The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider, Ali, and Collateral. And now America will be able to experience Miami Vice in all its glory, feasting like the starved survivors of a drought on wondrous Mann dialogue such as:
JAMIE FOXX: So garble you gonna unclear or are we gonna bloiphernatter?
COLIN FARRELL: I wonna ghufurrr unless the mumble.
JAMIE FOXX: Got that right, muthababa.
Yes, even though Mann went through hell to get his film made, he is releasing it to thousands of theaters and millions of moviegoers without having bothered to ensure that the words spoken by the actors are even minimally audible, or comprehensible, to his audience.
I think Miami Vice is about a squad of undercover cops who get in over their heads when they try to bring down a Colombian drug ring responsible for the murder of some FBI agents. I say “I think” because this movie requires a lot of guessing, almost as much as watching a television show on Univision would require for someone who’d taken a year of high-school Spanish three decades earlier.
Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell aren’t even the worst dialogue offenders in Miami Vice. The Chinese actress Gong Li plays a Colombian drug dealer who lives, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, in a suburb of Havana. (Her character’s mother was a translator in Angola, if that helps. Oh, it doesn’t?) She and Farrell share several lengthy, mournful, talky scenes in which they both look smashing. The thing is, I’m pretty sure Gong Li doesn’t really speak English, and learned her part phonetically. You can make out maybe 20 percent of her lines.
Meanwhile, Foxx’s love interest is played by a gorgeous black actress from England named Naomie Harris. Even though Harris is playing a Miami cop, she puts on a Brooklyn-Bronx accent that comes and goes like the Michelangelo-talking women at Prufrock’s party. Let me now interrupt this review for the surprise announcement that Naomie Harris has been awarded the coveted 2006 “What the Hell Is She Saying?” Prize from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for her work in Miami Vice and in this month’s box-office bonanza, Pirates of the Caribbean 2. As a voodoo priestess with black teeth in Pirates, Harris delivers huge chunks of crucial expository information in a really thick hey-mon Islands sing-song that makes interpreting her words more difficult than reading Finnegans Wake.
If there was one thing you could count on from the Old Hollywood, it was that you would hear the dialogue. I don’t ever remember having a whispered conversation in a revival house questioning what it was that Bogey or Bette just said. Even song lyrics were delivered with crisp clarity. It is one of the extreme peculiarities of the new Hollywood that, despite extraordinary technical innovations in the use of sound, you get auditory catastrophes like Miami Vice that wouldn’t have passed muster in the halls of fourth-rate studios like Republic or Monogram back in the day. If you’re going to spend extravagantly, why not throw in a few hundred thou to get Gong Li and Naomie Harris back into the sound lab to do more “looping” (the term for rerecording lines of dialogue during post-production)?
The answer is that the directors and producers think they have a lot more to worry about when it comes to sound. Getting the music and the sound effects during the chase scene to work together, or getting the right machine gun rat-a-tat, is considered more crucial to the movie’s success. And since directors are often working under the pressure of a fixed release date, they are forced to make compromises.
In the case of Miami Vice, though, there are far too many compromises–not just when it comes to the dialogue. The movie begins with a 10-minute scene in a Miami club in which our undercover squad is investigating a guy, or a couple of guys, who are either running prostitutes or hiring prostitutes or beating up prostitutes. Then it turns out that everything we’ve just seen doesn’t matter at all, because Farrell gets a phone call and suddenly the plot shifts to the Colombian drug ring and we never get back to the prostitutes. Which kind of raises the question, “Who’s helping the poor prostitutes?”
Even worse than the plot holes is the unrelieved gloom. Miami Vice is always watchable and has some magnificent shots, but everybody glowers and frowns like it’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. A movie with the word “vice” in the title should have a little bit of dirty-minded fun in it. There isn’t a single moment of levity in the entire two-hour-plus running time. For his next birthday, Michael Mann’s friends should all chip in and buy him a sense of humor. And a boom microphone.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
