There are no opening credits to Miami Vice, and that is probably for the best, because otherwise we would have a name to put with this mess of a movie. Instead, the movie tries to be clever by launching us headfirst into the plot from frame one, but it goes all too fast and overshoots.
And what I mean is that there is no plot, or at least not one we can care about. In fact, no one in the movie seems to care about it either, which is a disappointment from actors who should be able to hide their apathy. Instead, they trod through the scenes uttering nonsensical dialog in tones so low that sometimes they are unintelligible; they do not care enough to enunciate their lines, and the movie suffers from it.
From the understandable dialog we can piece together a plot that may have looked good on paper: Sonny (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo (Jamie Foxx) penetrate a drug syndicate to catch a radical group that revealed an undercover FBI agent and killed him, his partner, and his family. Along the way, Sonny romances one of his targets, Isabella (Gong Li), who retrogresses without any outside influence from a strong and capable boss-type to an annoyingly pitiful "victim" . She falls in love with the undercover cop, her boss daddy gets angry, and the cliché lives on.
After an hour of minimal entertainment (For the record, there is not a single laugh in the whole movie), we realize that this is not the buddy cop movie that we expected. Sonny and Ricardo are acquaintances, but they appear together so infrequently that they seem to be avoiding each other. Only once does one express confidence in the other's ability as a law enforcer, but the expression changes nothing in either cop's attitude or actions. The movie asks us to split our partiality between both, but they are caught in personalities that we cannot help but abhor.
All the while, it is evident that something is going on plot wise. Unfortunately for the actors, none of the characters seems concerned enough to act logically. Unfortunately for the filmmakers, errors in sound direction drop crucial plot elements from the fragmented story. Unfortunately for the audience, enough people were lured into theaters for it to come in at number one at the box office. That is police brutality.
P.S.: Should Miami Vice not take place primarily in Miami?
And what I mean is that there is no plot, or at least not one we can care about. In fact, no one in the movie seems to care about it either, which is a disappointment from actors who should be able to hide their apathy. Instead, they trod through the scenes uttering nonsensical dialog in tones so low that sometimes they are unintelligible; they do not care enough to enunciate their lines, and the movie suffers from it.
From the understandable dialog we can piece together a plot that may have looked good on paper: Sonny (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo (Jamie Foxx) penetrate a drug syndicate to catch a radical group that revealed an undercover FBI agent and killed him, his partner, and his family. Along the way, Sonny romances one of his targets, Isabella (Gong Li), who retrogresses without any outside influence from a strong and capable boss-type to an annoyingly pitiful "victim" . She falls in love with the undercover cop, her boss daddy gets angry, and the cliché lives on.
After an hour of minimal entertainment (For the record, there is not a single laugh in the whole movie), we realize that this is not the buddy cop movie that we expected. Sonny and Ricardo are acquaintances, but they appear together so infrequently that they seem to be avoiding each other. Only once does one express confidence in the other's ability as a law enforcer, but the expression changes nothing in either cop's attitude or actions. The movie asks us to split our partiality between both, but they are caught in personalities that we cannot help but abhor.
All the while, it is evident that something is going on plot wise. Unfortunately for the actors, none of the characters seems concerned enough to act logically. Unfortunately for the filmmakers, errors in sound direction drop crucial plot elements from the fragmented story. Unfortunately for the audience, enough people were lured into theaters for it to come in at number one at the box office. That is police brutality.
P.S.: Should Miami Vice not take place primarily in Miami?