Miami Vice: Critic Reviews

Miami Vice, as entertaining as some of it is, is so cool that it's almost too cool. It takes the sin, and much of the juice, out of vice.

Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Michael Mann transforms a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle.

Many critics have found in Mann's films an excess of macho bluster. I can only say his power and exuberant self-belief expose the indentikit dullness of a hundred other meagre film-makers working with similar material.

The worst news about Miami Vice is that Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, replacing Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas in the key roles, don't hold a candle, a flashlight, a freakin' match to the original guys.

The movie is seriously sexy and seriously entertaining.

In a career marked by an obsession with the intricacies of law enforcement and criminal activity, this may be Mann's most brutally efficient policier yet.

Miami Vice is the last of the predicted summer blockbusters, and it delivers a reasonable amount of popcorn excitement.

It might be an empty vessel, but it zooms.

The new Miami Vice movie is not designed to leave audiences in a partying mood. On its own terms, though, it's frequently worthy of cheers.

The film, like its oddly rumbling sky, promises more than it ever delivers. Granted, it can look cool. But more often, as we wait for the lightning that never arrives, it frustrates.

I couldn't take my eyes off the screen. It's a sensational trip -- gorgeous, gaga.

This Miami Vice is a grim genre exercise -- fascinating, certainly, and impressive at times, but only intermittently enjoyable.

While this Vice isn't in the same league as Mann's Collateral (2004) or Heat (1995), it's a gritty, ultra-dark thriller, and it contains two of the best 'kill shot' scenes in recent years.

Miami Vice is a dazzler.

The pacing and proportion of Heat (1995) and the feeling for place and character evident in Collateral (2004) have been tossed aside for a routine plot in which vice cops Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx pose as drug dealers.

Miami Vice, the movie, is an atmospheric muddle, as gorgeous and unintelligible as raven-haired stunner Gong Li.

The plot is not overtaxing -- it's about guns, drugs and money -- because the real focus is the allure, danger and alienation of hiding behind an assumed identity.

Compared with Mann's other films, Miami Vice lacks the slam-bang set pieces of Heat and the human dynamic of Collateral.

I enjoyed Mr. Mann's new Miami Vice from its first ravishing frame to the last, but I can't say that very much of it made sense -- but then, neither do the daily headlines.

Miami Vice is crummy, pointless and brain-dead. No revelation there. But I didn't expect it to be so boring.

Vice revels in the creative latitude that an R-rated feature provides without departing from the show's rudimentary structure.

The antidote to M:i:III, Pirates II and every other circus of coagulated stunts is Miami Vice, my favorite Hollywood movie of the summer so far.

It works as well as it ever did. It works because Mann makes it work.

Miami Vice isn't perfect, but it is perfectly mesmerizing.

Sensual and scary, the movie is so visually textured you feel as though you're brushing against the screen.