Blue, grainy, glamour - Michael Mann's further meditation on the mechanics of extra-legality. Miami Vice feels like the culmination of everything Mann's oeuvre has promised: a policer stripped of all surplus exposition - even dialogue - to become pure, cold, calculated case. Simultaneously a post 80s high-tech metal-man action film, and a piece about meditative, clinging, spy people with dead end / self-immolation arcs.
Familiarity with the Cop vs Crims narratives is mandatory; Mann chooses to focus his attentions entirely elsewhere - the leads discuss nothing and understand each other through glances and invisible nod signals. Mann refuses any notion of a safe big budget action update, and instead delivers a head-ringing thought film about lies and self-alienation in pursuit of law process. Throughout, sweaty, hand-held (immediate) violence seems imminent. Miami Vice is almost a bubbling sci-fi identity crisis - the twin spectres of 80s CIA foreign policy and hidden (nuclear?) aggression loom large over it.
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