"Miami Vice"

What the hell happened to Michael Mann? We went to see the Miami Vice movie today, and we--my wife, mother-in-law, and I--hated it. Completely and utterly hated it. We opined, in fact, that it must have been his first screenplay.

Nuh-uh.

Let's get this said straight away: "Miami Vice" is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. It's nearly two and a half hours long, and you spend seventy-five percent of it waiting for something to happen. When that something finally does happen--someone gets shot--you think "Thank GOD!" because surely more stuff will happen...but no. What follows is more waiting, followed by the dullest gun battle in the history of modern cinema, followed by a whole bunch of nothing.

This is from the same man who directed (and wrote!) "Heat." It's from the same guy who turned Daniel Day-Lewis running up a mountain into one of my favorite film sequences ever--the end of "Last of the Mohicans." (And seriously, if you haven't seen that ending sequence, with Hawkeye chasing Magua, borrow the movie from the library or something, because it's awesome.)

There is a laundry list of problems with this movie, and it's long enough that I'm not really going to go into them. It's an incomprehensible, sad, boring mess of a movie. And it's dark. Very dark. I don't mean "atmospheric and moody", either. I mean you can't see a damn thing.

(Among many, many other sins, Mann never actually gives us a reason to give a damn about any of the people or events. Note to writers: just because your character bangs someone does not automatically mean that we give a damn.)