Delayed Reaction: Miami Vice

The Pitch: Remember that cheesy 80s Cop show? Let's shoot it like Collateral.

How I Came Into It: I knew oddly little about this. It's a big budget movie from a well known director that was a middling box office performer. That's a formula for a movie I should hear more about: either people deriding it for being awful or praising it as underrated and misunderstood. I remember one friend saying he walked out of it back in the day and that's about it. Certainly, the story of the production is interesting, with Michael Mann doing a lot of risky things like filming in locations that even locals considered unsafe.

Why I Saw It: (Club 50) This looks slick as hell. Mann fully commits to the look and feel of the movie. He wants it to be cool for 2005 the way that the original show was cool for 1985. The action is shot quite well. On paper, this is everything that it needs to be.

Why I Wish I Hadn't: I found the whole thing tedious. The story meanders at times and is too muddled to follow at other times. It takes itself way too seriously. Oppressively so. This is about the least I've like Jaimie Foxx or Collin Ferrell in anything. Foxx is trying way too hard to look cool. Whenever he's on camera, he's almost tense with the effort to look intensely calm. Ferrell seems to be aiming for a laconic disinterest that doesn't play well either. Part of me wants to rewatch and pinpoint the exact things that turned me off so much, but the vast majority is ok leaving that a mystery as long as it means I never have to watch this again.

Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend