Miami Vice (Michael Mann 2006)
Posted on December 10 at 12.42, 2006 by Eric Mahleb
Recently, as I walked down a very average street of one of the most average neighbourhoods in my city, a book stood out from the outside display racks of a very average bookstore: Michael Mann, published by Taschen.
I felt that the book somehow shouldn’t have been there. In a specialized bookstore of a more artistic neighbourhood, yes. But not here, in this bourgeois, conservative area that attracts mainly tourists and bankers…Yet, there it was, and it said to me that Michael Mann had now reached a level of notoriety and access that enabled him to be known and appreciated by a very wide range of people. A democratization of the visualization of cinema, or perhaps, rather, a middle-upperclassification of the action film. Have you seen the latest Michael Mann? It is soooo beautiful to look at! Hmm, the dialogs were a bit weak….Who cares, nobody can frame a scene like Michael Mann! The screenplay was a bit dodgy…Who cares, who needs a perfect screenplay when you can bath it all in a sumptuous blanket of moody blues and grays!
Sometime around the time of The Insider, the cinema of Michael Mann started leaking substance. Or perhaps long before. Ali left me unhappily hungry for more, Collateral perplexed by the arrogance of it all, and now Miami Vice, taking the arrogance of the previous film to the next level, angry that this director is successfully masking a total lack of substance with beautiful imagery. Actually, Mann does more than that with Miami Vice, taking the travesty to a new level. He strips his film bare of the usual layer of silly dialogues and plotting scenes usually associated with action films, so that what remains are the scenes that move and give the movie a rapid pace. This trimming of the fat gives the appearance of an intelligent and effective movie, a new breed of action film. Yet, the sight of these two undercover agents who are clearly so superior to anyone else around them, including the supposedly smart drug dealers who quickly accept to work with two guys they have never heard of before, requires too much suspension of disbelief to be credible. Credibility is an interesting concept in the action film. What makes an action film credible? Or is it part of the ideology of the action film to not be credible? Michael Mann attempts to deliver a smart action film and in the process, he also increases the level of expected credibility. However, he fails to deliver that credibility, thereby creating a disjoined, arrogant and confusing experience.
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