Full disclosure: in one of my high-school yearbook photos, I am wearing an aquamarine t-shirt under a white cotton sport coat. I also had a poster of Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas on my bedroom wall for about five years. “You Belong to the City” was my personal theme song for a few months. I even eliminated BYU from my prospective colleges list after I learned that the school had a dress code which required young men to be clean-shaven and wear socks at all times. Yes, my friends, I was a fan of the old Miami Vice TV series. Still am, to be honest, and I’m not at all ashamed of it. Hey, I looked damn good in that aqua-colored shirt.

Knowing all that, not to mention my usual distaste for remakes, I’m sure you can imagine that I approached the new Miami Vice feature film with a great deal of trepidation.

Actually, the only reason I approached the movie at all was because its writer/director, Michael Mann, was the executive producer on the old TV show, and just about every movie of his I’ve ever seen has had a decidedly Vice-ish feel to it, except for The Last of the Mohicans, of course. I figured if anyone could pull off a remake without pissing all over the original, it would be him. Even so, he had his work cut out for him.

In my estimation, in order for a remake to be successful, it must walk a thin line between originality and faithfulness. There’s no sense in revisiting the old material if you’ve got nothing new to say about it — just doing everything with modern special effects isn’t enough, I’m sorry to say — but by the same token, any remake is obligated to retain as much of the original as possible, in order to respect both fans of the original and the creative effort of those who went before. The new version of Battlestar Galactica, for instance, is an intelligent, well-made program when taken on its own terms, but as far as I’m concerned it fails as a remake because it hasn’t retained enough of the spirit or the details of the 1978 series. I frankly wish that Ron Moore had dropped the name Battlestar Galactica altogether and created an entirely new series that simply echoed the old BG. But that’s an argument I’ve made before, and I’m supposed to be talking Miami Vice here.

I’d heard from a number of people that the movie had nothing to do with the old series beyond the title and a few character names, so I wasn’t expecting much. To my surprise, however, I found that the movie retained a great deal of the TV series; I can only assume that many people don’t really remember the original Vice as well as they think they do. There was a lot more to the show than the pastel colors and pop-music soundtrack.

The plot of the movie is labyrinthian and doesn’t lend itself very well to summary, but in a nutshell, the film begins with Miami-Dade vice cops Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs receiving a phone call from a former source of theirs who has run afoul of some very tough customers. The source’s wife is dead, killed by the bad guys; the source himself soon commits suicide, and a very big investigation involving several federal agencies is compromised. Crockett and Tubbs remain unknown to the baddies, so they’re assigned to infiltrate the operation in the guise of drug smugglers. Complications arise when Sonny falls for the drug lord’s beautiful Asian girlfriend, and Tubbs’ wife Trudy is threatened with the same fate as their informant’s. Both men will be forced to ponder the consequences of pretending to be criminals in order to catch criminals, as well as the ways their job isolates them from the “real” world. In other words, it’s a typical Miami Vice storyline.
All of the recurring themes from the series are here: the tension between the small-time local cops and the Feds, the slippery-slope identity issues of living deep under cover, the question of how you can form relationships when your whole life is some kind of crazy lie. And the surface trappings of the old TV show are present, too, updated for the 21st Century, but still recognizable: Sonny’s Ferrari, the cigarette boats, the expensive clothes and glamorous homes, the beautifully decadent rot of a night-time world lighted by neon and muzzle-flashes. Even the incidental music sounds a lot like Jan Hammer‘s distinctive work on the television series, and there is a version of the song “In the Air Tonight,” which was featured prominently in one of the old show’s most memorable scenes. I didn’t think I’d be saying this, but the movie is Miami Vice.

Mann revels in the freedom he never had when this material was on the small screen. The original Miami Vice pushed the envelope of what was considered acceptable for television at the time, but its creators were still limited in just how far they could go, because they were, after all, working on television in the mid-1980s. The film version is far more graphic than the series ever could have been, both in terms of sex and violence, which results in a darker, more realistic-feeling story, a story where the stakes seem higher because you know the leads won’t be back next Friday night.

Mann also takes advantage of shooting for the big screen; MV is quite simply breathtaking in a visual sense. The wide oceans vistas, the dilapidated freighters at the waterfront, and the nighttime cityscapes are all impressively huge, the speed of the powerboats is visceral and thrilling, and the aircraft dart among columns of clouds that reach up for miles. The landscape of the film feels expansive in a way that Vice never did on a 19-inch screen in 1985.

If you’re getting the idea that I liked the movie, well, you’re correct, but it wasn’t without its flaws. I was bothered that all the secondary characters from the TV series, while they are present in the film, have virtually nothing to do. They’re so undeveloped that it’s difficult to tell which side they’re even on. If a viewer was unfamiliar with the original, I suspect they’d have a hard time figuring out that Switek and Zito are cops until halfway through the movie. The Trudy character, who was just another member of the vice squad on TV, has now become Tubbs’ wife, a change I’m okay with except that she isn’t fleshed out much. But the biggest problem with the film is an utter lack of chemistry between the two male leads, Colin Farrell as Sonny Crockett and Jamie Foxx as Rico Tubbs.

The series was a classic ’80s buddy-cop show. Crockett and Tubbs were more than just co-workers or partners, they were close friends who would defend one another no matter what. Their trust of one another was hard-won, and if that trust was betrayed, it was tantamount to a physical wound.

You don’t get that in the movie. You have no idea what kind of history the big-screen Crockett and Tubbs share, or how much (or even whether) they care about one another personally. Partly this is a flaw of the script, but I think the biggest issue is in the performances.

Jamie Foxx is an impressive actor who speaks volumes with his eyes even while his face remains impassive; Colin Farrell, on the other hand, just isn’t that good. He looks right for the part of Sonny Crockett, but he doesn’t give us much of Sonny’s inner life. While Don Johnson’s Sonny was immensely likable because he could be tough and sweet — I always had the impression that his Sonny was basically a nice guy who’d learned to hide his soft interior — Farrell’s Sonny is just a swaggering tough guy without much depth. Much like Farrell himself, I suspect. I really don’t like him much. From what I’ve heard, Foxx didn’t either, which may have contributed to the problem.

These issues aside, however, I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the film. If Miami Vice had to be remade — and these days it seems like everything that was remotely popular while I was growing up must be — than this movie was the way to do it. I just wish Michael Mann could’ve found someone other than Colin Farrell to fill Don Johnson’s loafers…