87 - Miami Vice review

Most professional reviewers seem to feel obligated to make comparisons between the new Miami Vice and the TV show that it’s based on. Not I. See, friends, having been born in 1984, I’m part of a generation that knows Miami Vice not through the brightly colored cop series, but from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which just so happens to be a video game.

I may not be able to effectively compare the series and the film, but if the TV incarnation was anywhere near as exciting as that video game, director Michael Mann would have been well advised to mimic it. Where that game was vibrant and fun, this film is gloomy, long, and boring. Perpetually looking like a thunderstorm hovered over filming, even indoors, the lead characters hack their way through a practically indecipherable web of scummy South American drug lords, malevolent Neo-Nazis (are there any other kind?), and dialogue so stiff you could bounce a quarter off of it.

The films stars Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, two actors who each seem to be in a new release every other month. Taking the roles of Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, respectively, they scowl and grimace as well as anyone going through airport security while going about their undercover business. Both are more than capable actors, but Mann gives them nothing remotely interesting to work with. Other than that Crockett likes Asian chicks, we learn nothing about them, and never feel like seeing more. One would think two hard boiled undercover detectives could provide thousands of fascinating possibilities, but somehow Mann has strip-mined every iota of interest from each one, leaving us with something that makes the rouge cop archetypes of yesteryear seem brilliant by comparison.

The plot, if you really want to know: Crockett and Tubbs infiltrate a drug syndicate. They talk unintelligible drug dealer talk for nearly two hours (presumably to lend a false aura of authenticity), and then get involved in a badly lit shootout that looks like it was edited with the ‘Random’ button. The end. Price tag: $135 million, roughly $100 million more than what it should have cost. The vulgarity here is astounding, even by Hollywood standards. At least the similarly priced and located Bad Boys 2 had dozens of explosions and shootouts; the only sign that Miami Vice was expensive are the South American locales, which are wasted anyway. Never mind that Miami itself is only seen through freeways, docks, and trailer parks. Did the TV series spend so much time in Panama or Cuba? Would a more fitting title be Latin America Vice?

Looking at Mann’s previous work, including the wonderful Heat and Collateral, only adds to the confusion. Here we have a director who has displayed a knack for imbuing standard genre material with a sharp, haunting edge. Heat portrays a battle between cop and criminal that transcends profession and goes to the core of the human condition. In Collateral, we only know the characters for a few hours, but we leave feeling we know everything about them. Miami Vice runs for two hours and then stops, leaving behind only colossal disappointment and rueful desire to have seen something better.

1.5 out of 5

86 - Roommate firing rifle

85 - The Last Supper review

Caught this on FX at 2 in the morning, wrote the review afterwards. Not my best, but decent considering I threw it together around 4 am.





The Last Supper almost works. It’s a bitter ‘almost’, as buried deep within the film’s flaws lies a valuable message. At least, I think it does; the execution comes off as so haphazard that I’d be reluctant to bet money on one message, just to hear the writer had another in mind.

Speaking of execution, the plot: Five Iowa grad students, Jude (Cameron Diaz), Paulie (Annabeth Gish), Luke (Courtney B. Vance), Marc (Jonathan Penner), and Pete (Ron Eldard), share the same house and often invite people over for dinner and politics. These are seriously pompous left-wingers, the sort who can’t get off the topic because reminding themselves how brilliant and compassionate they are functions as twenty-four hours worth of masturbation.

One evening, a truck driver (Bill Paxton) gives Pete a lift, and receives a dinner invitation. Even though the driver obviously has a few screws loose, that doesn’t stop them from ridiculing his service in the Gulf War, nor do they drop the subject when he expresses admiration for Adolf Hiter. The driver pulls a knife, and the ensuing struggle winds up dead with a blade in his side.
At first the group freaks out, but when calm returns, they feel strangely good about themselves. After all, he was a rotten man, it was sort of self-defense, and he fits right in the garden in the back yard. For once, they feel like they’ve actually accomplished something, which may be similar to the feeling I got recently when an acquaintance said "Fuck the NRA," and I seriously responded "No, fuck you!" Unlike me, who will probably won’t do that again for a couple of weeks, they decide to invite people whose politics they disagree with over for dinner (read: conservative Republicans), and if they can’t change their mind, they serve them some wine poisoned with arsenic.

Of course, any very political person can tell you that changing one’s entire political beliefs through the course of one conversation is virtually impossible. The grad students may feel like they are giving these people a chance, but in reality they have selected them for execution. Never do they consider that their views would be odious to many others, nor do they realize the irony in their favorite question, "If you could kill Adolf Hilter before he had done any damage, would you?" Their behavior echoes Hitler more than that of any Neo-Nazi they invite to dinner, with their fascist monopoly on the truth and distribution of death sentences. I mean, when you think about it, Hitler only murdered the extreme elements that were destroying German society, right?

While The Last Supper may take an unusually negative look towards the type of liberal that Hollywood normally fawns over, it does bear that leftward slant that is a prerequisite for any studio produced political film. While having dinner guests over who argue for a fair tax plan or an aggressive defense policy would be effective, most visitors have malevolent streaks a mile wide. Thinking seriously, when was the last time a conservative you know argued in favor of Hitler, said that the homeless deserve to be beaten to death, and that AIDS was the perfect cure for homosexuality? The blithe portrayal of every conservative as a venomous moron who knows no discourse other than the invective kind is preposterous, and seriously weakens the film’s moral core. It may criticize those on the left who would play God with human life, but it deeply sympathizes with that way of thinking, advocating tolerance of evil conservatives instead of their murder.

Observe the ending, where a Rush Limbaugh like figure (Ron Perlman) misses his flight and comes to dinner. Though well known for his right-wing rants, he cheerily dismisses this image to his hosts, matter-of-factly declaring that both the extreme right and left are bad, and that in reality, we should all be aiming for the center. First off, if you’ve ever met any serious right-wing types, you’d know they think less of moderates than they do liberals. Second, this constitutes a very cowardly cop-out on the part of the filmmakers. Why not have a seriously smart conservative that puts them in their place not through describing the need for moderation, in reality the bastion of the dimwitted and the weak, but by knocking them off their high horses and illustrating how they’ve become worse than those they murder? The Last Supper is on to something, but like its characters, allows itself to get way out of hand.

2 out of 5