Perhaps you won't even twitch
When
we were eating tons of delicious seafood and playing cards with our
parents-in-law yesterday, we eventually started to discuss movies, and
my mother-in-law asked if Will Ferrell is playing Crockett in that new
Miami Vice movie. I guess that would be an easy mistake to make,
confusing Will Ferrell with Colin Farrell. But it's not like this movie
could have been any worse even if Will Ferrell had actually starred in
it. Allow me to explain.
You see, I now have to shamefully admit that my bet not to spend even one penny on anything for two weeks came to an end today after only one week, when I decided to see "Miami Vice" and avoid the crowds, hoping that this movie would be just as great as the most excellent movies "Heat" and "Collateral" that were made by the same people. It sure is hot outside today, 36 degrees Celsius plus the humidity, but despite the heat, I put on my pink shirt, white slacks and loafers, and strolled to the nearby local cineplex to watch the show. And God, was doing so ever a huge mistake. It was almost as if the Universe itself had decided to punish me for breaking my word. I am sorry, Universe, I swear that I will never again break my word in such a stupid fashion. Please don't punish me any worse for this transgression.
I am certainly not exaggerating when I say that this movie was the biggest disappointment compared to the expectations that I had for such a long time that I can't even remember. And apparently I am not alone in this opinion: just go browse some of the IMDB user comments. The studio-planted "comments" are so fake to anybody who has seen this movie that they stick out like a sore thumb! But interns and D-girls are dime a dozen, so you can easily flood a popular site with "Easily one of the greatest action movies of this generation!", "The New Cool" and "A Gritty Crime Thriller" style praise that is so obviously fake that it is not even funny. I wonder if book publishers ever do the same thing with the Amazon user reviews. Nah, perish the thought.
You remember the movie "Hulk", how that movie consisted of one hour of strange and surreal backstory while the audience was kept waiting if perhaps Hulk will soon bother to appear? Or "Ocean's Twelve" that just lagged on and in which nothing made any sense? Miami Vice was like those two films put together, except much worse. We're deep in the "Ecks vs. Sever" territory here and then some, folks. Yes, Miami Vice really is that bad.
After the first 45 minutes, I was already tired and practically ready to walk out of the theater, praying for at least somebody to shoot someone so that something would happen. But I kept squeezing my fists and grinding my teeth, hoping that this movie would suddenly improve when we finally get to the action parts, especially to a big shootout scene that was advertised to be just as good as the one in "Heat". Ha ha, yeah right, as if. The whole thing just kept getting worse and worse, reaching new and completely uncharted levels of suckiness, until the end text "Miami Vice" (instead of the usual "The End") suddenly just appeared on the screen in the place where a normal action movie would have been just gearing up for the final showdown, mercifully taking the whole thing out of its misery.
At least Ecks vs. Sever had a plot and some action scenes in it, however silly. Miami Vice has... nothing. I am not lying when I say that there were two action scenes in the whole movie. Two, go ahead and count them yourself, two. Or if there were more, I certainly didn't notice them, or perhaps the whole experience was so horrible that I have already blocked them out of my memory. Of course, too much action and gunplay quickly gets boring, so perhaps there was instead interesting psychological development, sharp dialogue, character revelation and building and a plot that develops with interesting twists and turns, just like in "Heat". Oh God, you wish. The whole movie is just an incoherent mess of individual scenes in which absolutely nothing happens that would make any sense or advance the story, because throughout the movie, the characters just stand around with no discernible motivation or chemistry.
To make matters even worse, the movie is then edited in such a haphazard and jumpy manner that in the scenes that belong together you usually only realize later what was going on and what was supposed to lead into what. Of course, the parts of the movie that were clear and should have been damn obvious even to blind people, all those were thoroughly underlined and just went on and on. For the cinematography, I'm sure that this movie was probably shot as beautifully as "Heat" and "Collateral", but at least this movie seriously needs a total and complete re-edit from scratch.
The beginning of the movie was a ripoff of the nightclub scene in "Collateral" (in fact, quite a lot of stuff and general details in Miami Vice seemed to be directly ripped off from Collateral)... except that no, wait, it actually isn't, for the simple reason that nothing happens other than that Crockett and Tubbs and Trudy are standing around, and then finally Crockett goes on to take a phone call. This leads to the detectives taking off to a freeway where we meet some tweaker who had given up important information to criminals, and who then leaves the story just as abruptly as he entered it, in a setup taken directly from "Heat".
Whole plot lines and important details are introduced and then gleefully forgotten while the main storyline makes no sense. Apparently some kind of mole inside the FBI is leaking information to the powerful drug cartel which leads to drug criminals going to kill two undercover cops during their first preliminary meeting, for no apparent motive or benefit that I can ascertain. After that, the mole issue is just forgotten and it never gets resolved. Then again, since the whole movie features precisely one FBI character, I don't think that the answer would exactly be hard to guess, especially when we remember the laws of economy of drama so that if the hero cop has two bosses, one of them is a traitor. But I'm not spoiling anything, for the simple reason that there is nothing at all to spoil.
Of the other cast, I couldn't even tell who is supposed to be who, until we got to the scene where the whole Miami Vice gang was gathered in the luxury condo of some goofy white-collar criminal. What criminal he was and what relevance he had to anything, well, your guess is as good as mine. The fat guy who recently played the annoying fifth wheel in "Entourage" plays Switek, and the Irish gangster from the second Charlie's Angels movie minus some twenty pounds plays Zito. These two were actually the two best cast characters in the movie, in my opinion. But whoever did the casting missed the absolute greatest possible choice of casting that they could have possibly made, a mistake that is utterly unforgivable because it just stares you in the face during the whole movie. When Cieran Hinds (the guy who played Caesar in "Rome") first showed up with his hair coloured black and slicked back, I was practically jolted by the idea of making him Lt. Castillo. What a most excellent choice! Unfortunately, it soon turned out that his character is not Castillo, but following the tradition of Hollywood cop movies, the police chief "Castillo" was a fat middle-aged black guy, not unlike Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners remake. Now there is one convention of action films that I just can't understand and wish that somebody explained it.
Of course, the gang isn't complete without Gina and Trudy. (By the way, whatever happened to the two actresses who played them in the original series?) I was amused how in the beginning, I was thinking that they were undercover as prostitutes like in the TV show, but then realized that their way of dress is perfectly normal for young women these days. Heh. I'm not complaining or a prude or anything, but this slip of mind was just so amusing that I had to write it here.
Much later in the movie when we finally get to some action when the criminals have kidnapped Trudy to make "Burnett" and "Cooper" give back 60 million dollars worth of cocaine (now, I'm not an expert in organized crime, but I don't think that very many real-world drug smugglers would agree to such trade), we find out that all these cops are obviously SWAT-trained and equipped, including the kickbutt action girls that are so compulsory in movies these days. In a scene copied from an episode of the original TV show, Gina gets to save Trudy from the evil nazis (no, this was not a joke) in their meth laboratory. However, this joy is short-lived, since a magic bomb activated by the drug kingpin blows up the whole lab, almost taking Trudy with it.
As poor Trudy fights for her life in intensive care, the whole gang has to anxiously wait at the hospital and swear revenge. This time it's personal! After that, we finally get to the promised big shootout scene, which has no sense of any kind of "realism" or "intensity" but falls just as flat as the preceding movie. Most of the time, you can't even tell who is shooting who and from what direction, and what the overall situation in the battle is supposed to be. Even though there is a whole SWAT team around, in the usual Hollywood fashion only our two heroes bother to go after the escaping main villain once his henchmen have been eliminated, and do so with a rather... interesting choice of weaponry that was chosen probably for the spectacular deaths that one could cause with it.
I am not sure what Toronto Star was thinking when it lavishly praised this movie last Friday and gave it 3 1/2 stars out of four. The two local free commie rags were hating this movie, so I immediately assumed that it would be just great, but now my whole worldview has been turned upside down. Better not think about that any further. Come to think of it, I don't think that the words "Miami Vice" were even once uttered during the movie itself. These guys certainly don't fool around with pimps and hos or Izzy or Noogie, but they go so deep undercover that they find it difficult to remember who they really are, and are then ready to scrap with the worst of the worst even if they are armed with military hardware. And I was so looking forward to at least one scene where the detectives come in with guns and yell "Miami Vice!" Even this little thing the filmmakers didn't want to give us. Needless to say, Crockett doesn't live on a boat or have a pet alligator.
Oh yeah, I do have one more question about the standard Hollywood action film conventions. This one about morality and ethics. Why is it that a career criminal who has obviously participated in countless crimes and murders and caused incalculable misery gets to walk away scot free and everything is forgiven, for the simple reason that she has a vagina? Sure, there are solid sociobiological reasons why women are valuable and men are mostly expendable, but most certainly not to such ridiculous extent.
You see, I now have to shamefully admit that my bet not to spend even one penny on anything for two weeks came to an end today after only one week, when I decided to see "Miami Vice" and avoid the crowds, hoping that this movie would be just as great as the most excellent movies "Heat" and "Collateral" that were made by the same people. It sure is hot outside today, 36 degrees Celsius plus the humidity, but despite the heat, I put on my pink shirt, white slacks and loafers, and strolled to the nearby local cineplex to watch the show. And God, was doing so ever a huge mistake. It was almost as if the Universe itself had decided to punish me for breaking my word. I am sorry, Universe, I swear that I will never again break my word in such a stupid fashion. Please don't punish me any worse for this transgression.
I am certainly not exaggerating when I say that this movie was the biggest disappointment compared to the expectations that I had for such a long time that I can't even remember. And apparently I am not alone in this opinion: just go browse some of the IMDB user comments. The studio-planted "comments" are so fake to anybody who has seen this movie that they stick out like a sore thumb! But interns and D-girls are dime a dozen, so you can easily flood a popular site with "Easily one of the greatest action movies of this generation!", "The New Cool" and "A Gritty Crime Thriller" style praise that is so obviously fake that it is not even funny. I wonder if book publishers ever do the same thing with the Amazon user reviews. Nah, perish the thought.
You remember the movie "Hulk", how that movie consisted of one hour of strange and surreal backstory while the audience was kept waiting if perhaps Hulk will soon bother to appear? Or "Ocean's Twelve" that just lagged on and in which nothing made any sense? Miami Vice was like those two films put together, except much worse. We're deep in the "Ecks vs. Sever" territory here and then some, folks. Yes, Miami Vice really is that bad.
After the first 45 minutes, I was already tired and practically ready to walk out of the theater, praying for at least somebody to shoot someone so that something would happen. But I kept squeezing my fists and grinding my teeth, hoping that this movie would suddenly improve when we finally get to the action parts, especially to a big shootout scene that was advertised to be just as good as the one in "Heat". Ha ha, yeah right, as if. The whole thing just kept getting worse and worse, reaching new and completely uncharted levels of suckiness, until the end text "Miami Vice" (instead of the usual "The End") suddenly just appeared on the screen in the place where a normal action movie would have been just gearing up for the final showdown, mercifully taking the whole thing out of its misery.
At least Ecks vs. Sever had a plot and some action scenes in it, however silly. Miami Vice has... nothing. I am not lying when I say that there were two action scenes in the whole movie. Two, go ahead and count them yourself, two. Or if there were more, I certainly didn't notice them, or perhaps the whole experience was so horrible that I have already blocked them out of my memory. Of course, too much action and gunplay quickly gets boring, so perhaps there was instead interesting psychological development, sharp dialogue, character revelation and building and a plot that develops with interesting twists and turns, just like in "Heat". Oh God, you wish. The whole movie is just an incoherent mess of individual scenes in which absolutely nothing happens that would make any sense or advance the story, because throughout the movie, the characters just stand around with no discernible motivation or chemistry.
To make matters even worse, the movie is then edited in such a haphazard and jumpy manner that in the scenes that belong together you usually only realize later what was going on and what was supposed to lead into what. Of course, the parts of the movie that were clear and should have been damn obvious even to blind people, all those were thoroughly underlined and just went on and on. For the cinematography, I'm sure that this movie was probably shot as beautifully as "Heat" and "Collateral", but at least this movie seriously needs a total and complete re-edit from scratch.
The beginning of the movie was a ripoff of the nightclub scene in "Collateral" (in fact, quite a lot of stuff and general details in Miami Vice seemed to be directly ripped off from Collateral)... except that no, wait, it actually isn't, for the simple reason that nothing happens other than that Crockett and Tubbs and Trudy are standing around, and then finally Crockett goes on to take a phone call. This leads to the detectives taking off to a freeway where we meet some tweaker who had given up important information to criminals, and who then leaves the story just as abruptly as he entered it, in a setup taken directly from "Heat".
Whole plot lines and important details are introduced and then gleefully forgotten while the main storyline makes no sense. Apparently some kind of mole inside the FBI is leaking information to the powerful drug cartel which leads to drug criminals going to kill two undercover cops during their first preliminary meeting, for no apparent motive or benefit that I can ascertain. After that, the mole issue is just forgotten and it never gets resolved. Then again, since the whole movie features precisely one FBI character, I don't think that the answer would exactly be hard to guess, especially when we remember the laws of economy of drama so that if the hero cop has two bosses, one of them is a traitor. But I'm not spoiling anything, for the simple reason that there is nothing at all to spoil.
Of the other cast, I couldn't even tell who is supposed to be who, until we got to the scene where the whole Miami Vice gang was gathered in the luxury condo of some goofy white-collar criminal. What criminal he was and what relevance he had to anything, well, your guess is as good as mine. The fat guy who recently played the annoying fifth wheel in "Entourage" plays Switek, and the Irish gangster from the second Charlie's Angels movie minus some twenty pounds plays Zito. These two were actually the two best cast characters in the movie, in my opinion. But whoever did the casting missed the absolute greatest possible choice of casting that they could have possibly made, a mistake that is utterly unforgivable because it just stares you in the face during the whole movie. When Cieran Hinds (the guy who played Caesar in "Rome") first showed up with his hair coloured black and slicked back, I was practically jolted by the idea of making him Lt. Castillo. What a most excellent choice! Unfortunately, it soon turned out that his character is not Castillo, but following the tradition of Hollywood cop movies, the police chief "Castillo" was a fat middle-aged black guy, not unlike Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners remake. Now there is one convention of action films that I just can't understand and wish that somebody explained it.
Of course, the gang isn't complete without Gina and Trudy. (By the way, whatever happened to the two actresses who played them in the original series?) I was amused how in the beginning, I was thinking that they were undercover as prostitutes like in the TV show, but then realized that their way of dress is perfectly normal for young women these days. Heh. I'm not complaining or a prude or anything, but this slip of mind was just so amusing that I had to write it here.
Much later in the movie when we finally get to some action when the criminals have kidnapped Trudy to make "Burnett" and "Cooper" give back 60 million dollars worth of cocaine (now, I'm not an expert in organized crime, but I don't think that very many real-world drug smugglers would agree to such trade), we find out that all these cops are obviously SWAT-trained and equipped, including the kickbutt action girls that are so compulsory in movies these days. In a scene copied from an episode of the original TV show, Gina gets to save Trudy from the evil nazis (no, this was not a joke) in their meth laboratory. However, this joy is short-lived, since a magic bomb activated by the drug kingpin blows up the whole lab, almost taking Trudy with it.
As poor Trudy fights for her life in intensive care, the whole gang has to anxiously wait at the hospital and swear revenge. This time it's personal! After that, we finally get to the promised big shootout scene, which has no sense of any kind of "realism" or "intensity" but falls just as flat as the preceding movie. Most of the time, you can't even tell who is shooting who and from what direction, and what the overall situation in the battle is supposed to be. Even though there is a whole SWAT team around, in the usual Hollywood fashion only our two heroes bother to go after the escaping main villain once his henchmen have been eliminated, and do so with a rather... interesting choice of weaponry that was chosen probably for the spectacular deaths that one could cause with it.
I am not sure what Toronto Star was thinking when it lavishly praised this movie last Friday and gave it 3 1/2 stars out of four. The two local free commie rags were hating this movie, so I immediately assumed that it would be just great, but now my whole worldview has been turned upside down. Better not think about that any further. Come to think of it, I don't think that the words "Miami Vice" were even once uttered during the movie itself. These guys certainly don't fool around with pimps and hos or Izzy or Noogie, but they go so deep undercover that they find it difficult to remember who they really are, and are then ready to scrap with the worst of the worst even if they are armed with military hardware. And I was so looking forward to at least one scene where the detectives come in with guns and yell "Miami Vice!" Even this little thing the filmmakers didn't want to give us. Needless to say, Crockett doesn't live on a boat or have a pet alligator.
Oh yeah, I do have one more question about the standard Hollywood action film conventions. This one about morality and ethics. Why is it that a career criminal who has obviously participated in countless crimes and murders and caused incalculable misery gets to walk away scot free and everything is forgiven, for the simple reason that she has a vagina? Sure, there are solid sociobiological reasons why women are valuable and men are mostly expendable, but most certainly not to such ridiculous extent.
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