Re: Michael Mann's MIAMI VICE (merged)
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Originally Posted by Richard--W
Thanks everyone for your good replies.
I'd like to get more feedback from the membership, please.
Let's stay focused on the question posed in Post 373: what went wrong with MIAMI VICE ?
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As I think I pointed out way earlier in the thread, I think people were expecting a kind of Bad Boys film, not a more mature film as Mann's films are. I think it also, because of it's kitschy Miami Vice link, turned off the kind of audience that appreciates Mann's films. My father, for instance, really enjoys and appreciates Mann's films, especially the Insider, Ali, and Collateral. Yet when I asked if he wanted to go see Miami Vice, it was a resounding no, it just seemed like a big action film rather than a Mann film. So I think the audience it grabbed was a kind of mainstream action-film audience who do not expect or want intelligent character films, and many people oddly enough found it boring or confusing.
I personally, thought it had many moments of genius, and some absolutely fantastic scenes, and was visually incredible. As a whole, I think Mann needed to slow the film down more in the second half. He moved this film very quickly, and it got a bit aways from the characters, especially the female characters who were not as strong as they could have been. Thinking about it now, I realize that all of Mann's films really have a very strong male-dominated cast(obviously dealing with crime and the like), and it was interesting to see strong female characters for once, but we didn't really see enough of them I thought. I think a longer film actually would have left more time for us to see the characters interact more, as most of their relationships are established extremely fast and with all the small details (which still worked quite well IMO). What I REALLY appreciate about Mann in so many of his other films is that they have a great deal of down-time in the film, where tension builds and then the film basically comes to a stop, a kind of time for the characters to think inwardly,and it's a also time for the audience to really get into the heads of the characters, and these are among my favorite moments in Mann's films. Russell Crowe alone in a hotel room thinking about his family in the Insider, the main character in Manhunter staring directly into the camera thinking, Ali running through the streets, Tom Cruise stopped and staring at the wolf in the middle of the street, etc. I love those moments when the characters are coming to terms with what's going on around them and what they're going to do, and the pace of Miami Vice especially in the second half left no room for that kind of thing, and I thought a longer film actually would have allowed for more time to see the characters interacting in more mundane kinds of ways. Most of Mann's films work that way, we remember the fantastic action, but we forget that most of his films are pure drama, only briefly breaking into violence as the conflict resolves or spills over, and I think Miami Vice as a whole was too much of the moments of building conflict breaking into violence and not enough of the downtime in between all that where we're allowed to really see the characters interacting. We see some of that, but it's extremely compressed and fast, in order to move the plot along, too quickly in my opinion. If you consider that Miami Vice has a plot that is at least as complicated as Heat, you also realize that Heat was a much longer film as a result, and I think a film of that length would have allowed the drama which is the high point in Mann's work, the space it really deserves.
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