Leading Ladies: July 2006

Miami Vice

Stars: Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Gong Li, Naomie Harris
Director: Michael Mann
Rating: R

Those warm and fuzzy feelings we have for the TV show are just going to make us that much more disappointed in this big-screen remake, say this week's female critics, who deem the movie version a flashy, but empty do-over on the Florida cop drama.

The Associated Press's Christy Lemire says the movie is "so self-serious at times, it'll prompt you to laugh out loud at moments that aren't supposed to be funny. Which is a total letdown because, theoretically, this is Mann's pure, true vision, now that he's free from the television decency standards that constrained him when his series was at the height of its pop-culture prowess in the mid-1980s."

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel's Phoebe Flowers writes, "There are exactly two sequences in [the movie] that remind you that it was made by a director of distinction. Unfortunately, the first comes more than 90 minutes in, and the second is what passes for a climax in this bloated and torpid enterprise. Despite all the sex, drugs and dated rock 'n' roll, Miami Vice is about as hip as a marathon session of Uno."

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Carrie Rickey says, "The movie is an atmospheric muddle, as gorgeous and unintelligible as raven-haired stunner Gong Li... [and] mustached and soul-patched, Farrell's Crockett looks like Davy with the coonskin on his face. Goateed and edged like a topiary, Foxx's Tubbs resembles a metrosexual Malcolm X. Where stubble once reigned, facial hair now runs amok."

And Salon's Stephanie Zacharek offers one of the few bits of praise among the female critics, saying "Miami Vice doesn't necessarily plumb deep themes. But Mann — who has made such a range of movies it's hard to pin him down, although people generally think of him as an explorer of 'masculine' ideas — turns [the movie] into an exploration of tone and mood, and he makes that enough. The violence in Miami Vice is jarring, unsettling and beautifully executed."

Female consensus: It's criminally underwhelming

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