‘Miami Vice’ Will Have You Floating On Air If You Simply Give Yourself Over To Its Enrapturing Artifice

Pro wrestling terms have entered mainstream political discourse, so you might be familiar with phrases like “heel turn”—to become a villain—or perhaps “kayfabe”: to maintain a fictitious artifice. Some others, you might know yet. For instance, the “mark,” or the fan willing to buy into fiction and cough up cash, and his more cynical, self-important cousin the “smark” (or the “smart mark”), who rejects “kayfabe,” and haughtily refuses to get invested despite purchasing a ticket. Smarks are a dime-a-dozen in cinema circles too, filling repertory theaters with contemptuous laughter during older films—like Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, which was just recently featured in the Criterion Channel’s “Miami Neo-Noir” series.

If you’re lucky enough to live near a big city, you might have had the chance to watch Miami Vice on the big screen in recent years. But if you’re unlucky, like me, this might have turned into an unpleasant experience numerous times, owing to snarky (or “smarky”) audience members showing off their deadly allergies to sincere emotional expression. Then again, Mann’s enrapturing 2006 Floridia noir—a rough film shot mostly on digital video—is practically intended to cut against the grain of stylistic and dramatic expectations. So, perhaps the performative guffawing should come as no surprise, annoying as it may be. There is, after all, no singular consensus on Miami Vice, though its broad trajectory is that of a misunderstood masterpiece, derided by many upon arrival and championed by a few, until that latter group grew larger over the years.

Now, it’s been wholly critically re-appraised, and like any film of its stature, one has to wonder if it was ahead of its time. The strange thing, however, is that revisiting today reveals that it absolutely wasn’t. Miami Vice was distinctly of its moment—one of rap/nü-metal mashups and emerging digital tools on either side of the screen. However, it’s a film that forces a closer inspection of a world that was just starting to become engulfed by the internet, by surveillance, and by screens in every direction, making it a premonition of things to come.

Its stylistic tension is between the rhapsodic and the naturalistic—the very same tension of wrestling kayfabe, since the bawdy American art form is filled with over-the-top characters like demon clowns and lizard men, but is presented through the reality of live, sports-like broadcasts. In Miami Vice, this dichotomy takes shape in the movie’s opening scenes, as Mann and cinematographer Dion Beebe use the then-new Thomson Viper FilmStream Camera—leaving behind the tactility of celluloid—to capture their characters in up-close and personal ways on short lenses, with no filter, and with the deep focus of a home video. But characters are modelled according to more traditional modes of film and television: the weekly soap opera world, into which the Mann-produced Miami Vice TV show of the 1980s injected a cinematic sensibility. Two decades later, Mann practically reverses this process, by having his no-nonsense, ultra-serious undercover cops, “Sonny” Crockett (Colin Farell) and “Rico” Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), deliver melodramatic dialogue in a world rendered with the hypnotic hyper-realism of Dogme 95. Where you expect mumblecore, Mann instead rides right up to the line of Shakespeare. (“Things go wrong. The odds catch up. Probability is like gravity: you cannot negotiate with gravity.”)

Miami Vice may as well be designed to expose the seams of Hollywood artifice (most of its American characters are played by British or Irish actors, each performing with flimsy accents). However, these are features, not bugs, and they call into question what authenticity even looks like—and whether it can truly exist—in a world of screens and digital cameras. The film’s very first frames are that of a dancer writhing against an LED backdrop, and nearly every scene features some form of surveillance, whether via massive helicopters up above, or as seen on tiny Nokia phones that can be neatly placed in one’s pocket. For the movie’s characters—especially Sonny, whose goes undercover, and falls for Gong Li’s Cuban-Chinese drug queen-pin Isabella—the question of romantic escape across the open ocean ends up tied directly to one of trust, and of whether an authentic self can even exist in such close proximity to criminal enterprise, where for cops and criminals alike, the mask is everything.

It’s exactly the kind of neo-noir you’d expect from a story remaking an ‘80s TV series, only now it comes with added digital layers at every turn. Although shot at 24 frames per second, the widened shutter angle to shoot in low light imbues each scene—especially moments of action—with the increased motion blur of something filmed at 30 fps, television’s standard at the time. Mann’s heightened romantic drama, therefore, becomes injected with an attention-grabbing sense of reality. The digital noise during night scenes makes Miami Vice feel like a rough, DIY production (despite its 9-figure budget), but it gives the frame not only physical texture, but a living pulse. Its straight-faced, deathly serious macho-men—with their fancy cars, crisp suits, loud guns, and “go-fast” boats—are immediately exposed as performers, but the world around them never ceases to feel intimate, as though it were being captured by some curious onlooker, camcorder in hand.

In the contemporary world of smartphones and social media, you can usually tell when someone is acting (with a capital “A”) in a would-be viral video, so rejecting its reality is practically second nature to the modern viewer. It is, therefore, unsurprising that some might have the same knee-jerk reaction to Mann’s phantasmagorical combination of theatrical performance and grounded cinéma verité. However, as with professional wrestling, buying into the artifice is a far more rewarding experience, and a film like Miami Vice offers such a wild combination of artistic approaches that giving yourself over to it can make you float on air. No viewer, for even a second, will believe they’re watching anyone other than Farell in the years before he learned to sound fully American, or Foxx before he’d figured out how to modulate his scowls. But in each and every moment, they swing for the fences with such bravura that it’s hard not to get swept up in the movie’s operatic delights and its characters’ sincere yearning—that is, if you’re willing to be a mark.

Siddhant Adlakha (@SiddhantAdlakha) is a New York-based film critic and video essay writer originally from Mumbai. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Variety. the Guardian, and New York Magazine.