el Miami de Mann

tal como lo esperaba, las criticas de Miami Vice vienen buenas. Un agraado. Bien por la critica yanqui. Un film como Miami Vice podria ser considerado solo como una cinta mas basada en la series de tv o una maquina veraniega para ganar dinero pero todo lo que toca Mann, sobre todo con su nva camara digital, lo transforam en otra cosa. Mañana se estrena en todo USA y en sept x acá.

aqui van algunas criticas:

ROLLING STONE

Some say Michael Mann is an acquired taste. I say an appreciation of Mann's films, notably Heat, The Insider, Collateral, Ali, Thief and Manhunter, means you have taste. At sixty-three, he's a world-class filmmaker who's still breaking rules and rubbing nerves raw. Mann extended the reach of TV with Miami Vice (1984-89), despite those who only remember that Don Johnson, as undercover cop Sonny Crockett, and Philip Michael Thomas, as his partner, Ricardo Tubbs, wore pastels and no socks and moved to the cool beat of Jan Hammer's theme.
Know what? Forget the TV show. Mann reinvents it for the movie. Miami isn't just Miami anymore, it's the world -- a hub for globalized dealings in drugs, weapons, laundered cash and human flesh. Just don't expect Mann, as writer and director, to play teacher. The rules of narrative go out the window in an opening scene that slams you right into a stakeout at a Miami club. The vice squad is on the scene, led by Colin Farrell as Sonny and Jamie Foxx as Ricardo. They don't sit around trading backstories so the audience can catch up. Mann doesn't play catch-up: There is a brute ferocity to this movie that will knock you on your ass. Look out for the trailer-park shootout and an explosive climax that approach the classic melees in Heat. Leave it to Mann to match ferocity with feeling. As always, he is obsessed with the seductively dangerous environments in which complex men do corrupting jobs. Mann brings the heat, but if you don't pay attention you won't feel it.

This technique puts a lot of pressure on the actors, and do they ever deliver. Foxx plays Ricardo like a tightly coiled spring; only his relationship with Trudy (Naomie Harris), an intel analyst, leaves him vulnerable. And Farrell, out of the daze that dulled his performances in Alexander and The New World, seems alive to every nuance in his role. You'd be alert too if you were mixing it up with Gong Li. She's an absolute stunner as Isabella, the Chinese-Cuban financial officer in the employ -- and bed -- of Jesus Montoya (Luis Tosar), a soft-spoken version of evil incarnate who'd send his respects to your family before ordering your execution. John Ortiz also scores as Jesus' polar opposite, a drug middleman who wears his hostilities on his sleeve. As the film moves fluidly from Miami to Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and the Dominican Republic, the inner
workings of each character begin to reveal themselves.




But wait, I was talking about Gong Li. Even when her accent is impenetrable, she draws you in. She certainly draws in Sonny. Once he tells her he has a thing for mojitos, they're off to Cuba in a speedboat -- a scene of dizzying glamour -- drinking, dancing and going at each other with enough carnality to singe the screen. With Mann, of course, things always go deeper than mere flesh. The emotional bond that forms between Sonny and Isabella, like the one between Ricardo and Trudy, leads to potential tragedy. Sappy? Not a bit. Mann is a romantic, not a sentimentalist. His characters don't whine or cry. Says Ricardo, "Guns come out -- this is what we do."

What Mann does is create a world where action really does define character. He is ably abetted by a spot-on supporting cast -- a big shout-out to Barry Shabaka Henley as the vice bossman. But Mann's chief collaborator is Dion Beebe (Collateral), a balls-out cinematographer who works visual miracles with a high-definition Viper camera that seems to see deeply into the night and illuminate moral shadows even in blazing sunlight. When the movie hits trite notes, it quickly recovers to break new ground. Don't mind the talk about the soaring budget (the studio owns up to a whopping $135 million) and troubles on the set with storms and stormier egos. The price of a ticket still buys you one terrific movie. If you're looking for a crime story that sizzles with action, sex and the visceral jolt of life on the edge, Miami Vice is the one. But what raises this ball of fire above the herd is the haunting sense of loss and loneliness Mann brings to material that feels lived in and achingly real.


PETER TRAVERS
(Posted: Jul, 20 2006)



EL NYT tb la apoya; dice q es un cinta de genero mezclada con cine de arte experimental

July 28, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
‘Miami Vice’: Operatic Passions, Yet Cool in the Heat

By A. O. SCOTT
IF there is a lesson to be extracted from the visual glories of “Miami Vice” — the painterly compositions of tropical sea and sky, the glowing, throbbing nightclub set pieces, the meticulously choreographed deployments of lethal force — it might be that love and work don’t mix. Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), the South Florida municipal employees whose labors preoccupy this movie (as they did its predecessor television series two decades ago), have pretty complicated jobs to begin with.

They impersonate highly skilled, business-minded drug couriers in the interests of bringing down far-reaching criminal enterprises, which means that they must be adept at handling fast boats, suitcases full of cash, small planes and large guns. Their private lives don’t take them far from the job. In his spare time Tubbs keeps company with a vice squad co-worker (Naomie Harris), while Crockett pursues a reckless affair with a drug kingpin’s wife and business associate (Gong Li), and these entanglements give the undercover work an extra jolt of intensity. By the time the final showdown with the bad guys comes around, Crockett and Tubbs have long since crossed the line that divides the professional from the personal.

But in the world of Michael Mann — a guiding creative force behind the small-screen “Miami Vice” and the writer and director of this movie version — no such line really exists. Whatever their particular jobs, his major characters tend to be men whose commitment to their professions transcends mere workaholism and becomes an all-consuming, almost operatic passion.

These men might be television producers or paid assassins, boxers or cabdrivers, cops or robbers or frontiersmen, and they might relate to one another as partners, antagonists or uneasy allies, but they all seem to share this essential trait. It is impossible to separate who they are from what they do. Crockett and Tubbs are not in it for the pension plan or the dental coverage, not for the planes and the boats and the cool sunglasses, not even for the righteous thrill of fighting crime. Their devotion to their work is irrational, risky, extravagant: you might even say crazy. They insist on doing it their own way, tolerating no interference from, for instance, some pencil-pushing F.B.I. suit (Ciaran Hinds).

In other words, they’re a lot like the detectives played by William L. Petersen in “Manhunter” and Al Pacino in “Heat,” or like Tom Cruise’s hit man in “Collateral,” to name just a few. Which is also to say that, like most of Mr. Mann’s men, they betray a telling resemblance to the man himself. Never one for compromise or restraint, this filmmaker throws himself into every frame, turning genre movies into feverish spectacles of style and feeling.

With “Miami Vice” he clearly had money to burn, and the flames are beautiful to behold. Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle. He fuses music, pulsating color and high drama into something that is occasionally nonsensical and frequently sublime. “Miami Vice” is an action picture for people who dig experimental art films, and vice versa.

I’m not exaggerating about the art. Some of the most captivating sequences have an abstract quality, as if Mr. Mann were paying homage to the avant-garde, anti-narrative cinema of Stan Brakhage in the midst of a big studio production. Dispensing with the convention that the pictures exist to serve the story, Mr. Mann frequently uses plot as an excuse to construct ravishing pictures.

The camera, with leisurely, voluptuous sensuality, ranges from crowded cities to the open sea, from billowy thunderheads to the rippling muscles on Mr. Foxx’s back. Like “Collateral,” “Miami Vice” was shot in high-definition digital video, which Mr. Mann, in collaboration with the brilliant cinematographer Dion Beebe, treats not as a convenient substitute for film but as a medium with its own aesthetic properties and visual possibilities. The depth of focus, the intensity of colors, and the grainy, smudged finish of some of the images combine to create a look that is both vividly naturalistic and almost dreamlike.

Not that the narrative makes too many concessions to realism, apart from the occasional swatch of untranslated law-enforcement jargon (“Our op-sec has been compromised”) and the rumpled, workaday presence of the wonderful Barry Shabaka Henley as Lieutenant Castillo, the down-to-earth commanding officer played on television by Edward James Olmos.

There is a basic setup involving white-supremacist methamphetamine dealers that is a red herring and the foreshadowing of a later surprise, but before too long we’re in the familiar world of heartless Latin American drug lords (in this case a retiring fellow played by Luis Tosar) and their sadistic minions (John Ortiz, looking like an especially disgruntled graduate student). The case requires elaborate cover, buckets of money and the finest, fastest air and sea vessels the taxpayers of Miami can afford. Not really, of course. The actual operating budget for the Miami police department in fiscal year 2005 was around $100 million, a good $50 million less than the reported production costs of “Miami Vice.”

The action jumps from Paraguay to Haiti, from Colombia to Cuba (impersonated, as usual, by the Dominican Republic), where Crockett and his lady friend drop in for cocktails one evening after work. The movie’s swirl of danger, glamour and professionalism expands the central conceit of the series, which was to imagine a pair of urban cops who looked, dressed and acted like movie stars.

After the show became a hit, real movie stars would occasionally swing by for a visit. Still, the old Crockett and Tubbs, played by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, carried a lot of baggage onto the set: divorces, dead partners, Vietnam, the N.Y.P.D. Their new, improved selves, by contrast, travel light and sleek, with no back stories to burden the picture with exposition. Except for something about Crockett’s daddy and the Allman Brothers, which explains Mr. Farrell’s mustache, if not his peculiar accent.

When the show made its debut in 1984, Mr. Johnson was a has-been — or never-quite-was — movie star, which helped give his character a grizzled, disappointed element of soulfulness. In the movie version, though, only real movie stars, who command attention simply by allowing the camera to behold them, will do. Mr. Foxx, sly, taciturn and effortlessly charismatic, certainly fulfills the requirement, as does Ms. Gong, a goddess of global cinema whose every word you hang on even when you can’t understand a single one. If there is any justice in the world, Ms. Harris (who can also be seen this summer in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”) will join their ranks before long.

Mr. Farrell, however, is a movie star only in the sense that Richard Gephardt is president of the United States. He’s always looked good on paper, and he’s picked up some endorsements along the way — from Oliver Stone, Joel Schumacher and Terrence Malick, among others — but somehow it has never quite happened. Here he squints and twitches to suggest emotion and slackens his lower lip to suggest lust, concern or deep contemplation, but despite his good looks he lacks that mysterious quality we call presence.

Mr. Mann’s script has its share of silly, overwrought lines, but they only really sound that way in Mr. Farrell’s mouth. (Did he really say, “I’m a fiend for mojitos”? ¡Dios mío!) When he’s not on screen, you don’t miss him, and when he is, you find yourself, before long, looking at someone or something else. Gong Li. A boat. A lightning bolt illuminating the humid summer sky.

Yet the flaws in “Miami Vice” are in the end part of its pulpy grandeur. It is in some ways an entirely gratuitous movie: the influence of the original series can be seen in any number of big car-chase-and-fireball crime thrillers, from “Bad Boys” to “Bad Boys II.” There isn’t much to add. But the irrelevance of this project makes Mr. Mann’s quixotic devotion to it seem perversely heroic. This was not a job that anyone needed to do, but then again no one could have done it better.

“Miami Vice” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has heavy swearing, heavy breathing and heavy gunplay.

MIAMI VICE

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Michael Mann; written by Mr. Mann, based on the television series created by Anthony Yerkovich; director of photography, Dion Beebe; edited by William Goldenberg and Paul Rubell; music by John Murphy; production designer, Victor Kempster; produced by Mr. Mann and Pieter Jan Brugge; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 133 minutes.

WITH: Jamie Foxx (Ricardo Tubbs), Colin Farrell (Sonny Crockett), Gong Li (Isabella), Naomie Harris (Trudy Joplin), Ciaran Hinds (Agent Fujima), Justin Theroux (Zito), Barry Shabaka Henley (Lt. Castillo), Luis Tosar (Montoya), John Ortiz (José Yero) and Elizabeth Rodriguez (Gina)



Esta critica es interesante pues es de Miami:


One Mann show: Director sharpens the focus

Rene Rodriguez
Miami Herald
Published: Friday, July 28, 2006


The Miami seen in Michael Mann's Miami Vice is a drastically different city than the one most people remember from the 1980s TV show: It's a still-seductive paradise on the verge of being run over by industrialization and rot.

All the retro Art Deco buildings and South Beach vistas have been replaced by towering modern skyscrapers and downtown highways and underpasses; the pink and baby-blue pastels have given way to gunship-metal grays and blacks; even the sun seems changed, not quite as blazing as before, hazier and less revealing. The tone is more melancholy, the humor nonexistent, the danger greater, the violence bloodier.

What hasn't changed: Detectives Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), are still deep undercover, on the trail of international drug traffickers. Miami Vice is both faithful to the spirit of the groundbreaking program yet distinctly different in its concerns. Where the show once seemed preoccupied with matters of fashion, style and attitude, the movie relegates those elements to the background. What most concerns Mann this time are the details of police work and their accompanying perils, both physical and psychological.

Mann (Thief, Collateral, Manhunter, Heat) has always been fascinated by the crime genre, and Miami Vice may be his purest, most technical exploration of the work police detectives do. The script, which Mann wrote, plops us right into the story without any set-up or explanation, and it takes a while to sort through all the thick jargon and the connections between characters. But the confusion is intentional and never bewildering: It's the kind of movie that is easy to trust, even when you're not exactly clear what's going on, because of the commanding vision that is guiding it.

And despite fine work by Farrell and Foxx as the two detectives (whose relationship here displays the shorthand of communication and instinctual understanding two longtime partners would share), as well as the beautiful Gong Li as a cartel accountant and Luis Tosar and John Ortiz as drug kingpins, Miami Vice is undeniably's Mann's show.

Using the high-definition digital cameras he used in Collateral, Mann gives Miami Vice a look that's hyper-stylized yet gritty, which invests almost anything he trains his cameras on with a hypnotic, entrancing power: a turbo-powered speedboat racing toward Cuba, a raid on a trailer park where puffy clouds are visible in the night sky, a ferocious shootout at a Miami River boatyard where the bullets seem to be whizzing past your head.

As much of a perfectionist as the late Stanley Kubrick, Mann expresses as much through visuals as he does through dialogue (watch how he uses a simple camera move to foreshadow a character's suicidal impulse moments before he kills himself). Although it's being sold as an action picture a la Bad Boys, Miami Vice doesn't have as much slam-bang sequences as you might expect. This is more of a thinking man's action flick -- a small, intense film made on a giant canvas that finds Mann experimenting with and pushing at the boundaries of mainstream filmmaking. This Vice may not glamorize Miami the way the TV show did, but it proves Mann has no interest in dumbing down his work, no matter how commercial its potentia



Finalmente, aqui va una de LA TIMES

Undercover vice
The big-screen "Miami Vice" has attitude to spare. Story and character, not so much.

By Kenneth Turan
Times Staff Writer

July 28, 2006

From "Thief," his first theatrical feature, through "Heat" and 2004's "Collateral," filmmaker Michael Mann has always felt the attraction of the hard, cold criminal world, where the night is alive with menace and the day is not far behind.

Now, with "Miami Vice," writer-director Mann both returns to the scene of a previous crime (he was executive producer of the emblematic 1980s TV series) and tries to push things further. A consummate filmmaker on a never-ending quest for increased intensity, ever-more tangible realism and heightened style, he is determined to take Miami cops Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs along with him on that particular ride.

But just as Crockett and Tubbs, here going deep undercover to infiltrate the mother of all drug cartels, find themselves possibly getting in over their heads, writer-director Mann faces a similar danger. While the moviemaking in "Miami Vice" is impeccable as always, its story finally turns out to be too flimsy a reed to support all of the weight put on it.

It is the filmmaking we notice first as the film opens in a hot and hedonistic Miami nightclub (is there any other kind?) as Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) and their crack law enforcement team prepare to take somebody down for unspecified nefarious activities.

Crockett goes onto the club's roof to get better cellphone reception and the screen suddenly opens up to a dazzling view of the Miami skyline that turns out to be typical of the film's visual resources.



Working once again (as he did in "Collateral") with cinematographer Dion Beebe and razor-sharp high-definition digital video, Mann has seen to it that every image we see is thought out and then thought out again. If an airplane flies past a cloud, it's the cloud of a lifetime; if a drug dealer has an out-of-the-way hideaway, it's near Brazil's spectacular Iguaçu Falls. Nothing is casual, nothing is done without yielding maximum visual effect.

After the look, the next thing we notice about "Miami Vice" is the endless supply of attitude. Everyone in the movie, especially Crockett and Tubbs, is way past mythic, way past cool. If lean, hard, macho looks could kill, there would be a lot more corpses strewn around than there already are.

Deputized by their boss Lt. Castillo (Barry Shabaka Henley) and FBI Special Agent Fujima (Ciaran Hinds) to find out how the drug lords know what they know, Crockett and Tubbs go into their undercover dance.

Acting tough and saying things like "If they didn't do time with us, they can't do crime with us" mightily impresses the bad guys, and Crockett and Tubbs get a meeting with Mr. Big, José Yero (an evilly magnetic John Ortiz), only to find that there is a Mr. Bigger named Montoya (dead-eyed Spanish actor Luis Tosar) who also must be won over. The deeper the boys go, with the danger and the adrenaline spiking ever higher, the harder it is for them to remember what they are trying to accomplish.

Clearly Mann did a formidable amount of research into the habits of undercover agents and drug smugglers alike, and the film goes to the far corners of South America, including Ciudad del Este at the intersection of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina, in its search for authenticity.

But while "Miami Vice" utilizes every high-tech toy in the business, including some nifty looking boats and airplanes, it also is so into its own myth and the posturings of its jargon-using characters that civilians may have occasional difficulty figuring out what people are saying and even what is going on.

Part of the fun of a film like "Miami Vice," obviously, is watching our heroes be too cool for school, but there can be too much of a good thing. This attitude is pervasive enough to feel repetitive, plus it acts as a mask that hampers the protagonists from acting in any other key and gets in the way of the audience forming an attachment to them.

Foxx's Tubbs, introduced with a steady girlfriend named Trudi (British actress Naomie Harris), does a better job of finding the person inside the character, but the script has him disappear for a stretch as "Miami Vice" gives considerable time to the developing romance between Crockett and Isabella (Chinese star Gong Li), a ruthless cartel financial officer. It is not a match made in cinematic heaven.

As hard as she is beautiful, and she is very beautiful, Gong Li's Isabella is such a convincing Dragon Lady that we are not convinced when she starts to warm up. A relationship with the similarly self-involved Crockett may be mandated by the script, but both characters are too in love with themselves to make their pairing as believable as it has to be for "Miami Vice" to have its way with us.

"Miami Vice" turns out to be not so much a reworking of the TV show as an old-fashioned B with an A-plus budget. This could be a good thing, and sometimes, as in some of the film's crackerjack action set pieces, it is. But without the ability to move off the mythic, without the emotional texture that "Heat" created, it is a film easier to admire than to get passionately involved with.

'Miami Vice'

MPAA rating: R for strong violence, language and some sexual content

A Universal Pictures release. Writer-director Michael Mann. Based on the TV series created by Anthony Yerkovich. Producers Mann, Pieter Jan Brugge. Director of photography Dion Beebe. Editors William Goldenberg, Paul Rubell.

Running time: 2 hours, 12 minutes.

In general release.