But none of that even matters. What the crap happened to this movie? It seemed to not know what it wanted to be. It was as if they got horribly confused while making the film. Both the lead actors who are normally excelent just stunk so terribly. Collin Ferrell with his rhaspy voice thing he was trying and terribly odd dialogue. Jamie Foxx with his "yes, I am damn sexy... AND ANGRY!!! OH AM I ANGRY!!!", all the other people with their horrible dialogue, people's accents changing in the movie, and I couldn't even understand half of what people were saying!

I loves me my Michael Mann movies. But this one doesn't even come CLOSE to ANYTHING he's done in the past. The pacing was terrible, the sound design was terrible, the editing was terrible, the odd documentary feel some of the scenes had was terrible, the oddly unexplained "Jamie Foxx knows how to fly a plane... and apparently owns one as well!", some of the music was terrible, and the whole opening was stolen from Collateral. Except this time it was Jamie Foxx beating people up instead of Tom Cruise.

For me, MV works best as an intimate Heat. Whereas Heat is a crime epic, with plot lines that near Shakespeare-ian and a near-Melville (Herman, not Jean-Pierre, though it's obvious that the French cinema maverick is an influence on Mann) want to confront a whole lifetime supply of knowledge (in Heat's case, the life of crime and the life of law); MV is very much an "in-the-moment" event for nearly all of the characters in the film. With the possible exception of Naomi Harris's Trudy character, none of the characters in the film experience anything that's going to truly change their life. Sure, they're going to learn from their mistakes and triumphs, but they might only have the fainest of memories of what they experienced in this film; because for people in the actual positions of Farrell's Crockett and Foxx's Tubbs, they can't afford to get "too deep" into their roles as undercover cops. That's the whole purpose of this film, to rationalize with the element that hardly any crime film truly gets right: the act that these police officers have to undertake in order to achieve justice. And that's very much what Mann wanted to do with this film. Just listen to his commentary, and I think you may come away with a more solid experience of what the film means to him. It's very personal, on the level that this profession means to him. When I first saw the film in the cinema, I wanted to rail against the blatant lack of on-screen charisma that Foxx and Farrell share. On subsequent views, I realized that they really shouldn't have any, because they are constantly trying to fool others around them to believe they are someone else entirely, they really can't take an effort to know each other on too deep of a personal level. Plus, the tragedy and anger that would occur if one of them was too lose a life would affect their job in a very serious way. I think for that level of detail and craftsmanship is what sets MV apart from the usual crime flick fair. It's a very serious film, and if you go in wanting to see either the TV show or a parody of the TV show (like the Starsky & Hutch or Dikes of Hazzard films) then you're setting yourself up for disappointment. One should have an open mind when watching Miami Vice, and you should always pay attention to each and every character's motivation.

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But this one doesn't even come CLOSE to ANYTHING he's done in the past. The pacing was terrible, the sound design was terrible, the editing was terrible, the odd documentary feel some of the scenes had was terrible, the oddly unexplained "Jamie Foxx knows how to fly a plane... and apparently owns one as well!", some of the music was terrible, and the whole opening was stolen from Collateral. Except this time it was Jamie Foxx beating people up instead of Tom Cruise.

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Baseless. The sound design and (near) perfect editing were part of the package that originally had me on the film's side in it's 2006 release. If there was one thing I came away with from that initial viewing, it was my appreciation for these two things. Mann will never, EVER disappoint you here, Clayton. As for the docu-feel, that's Mann's touch. If you've seen Collateral, then you knew that his second outing with an HD digital camera was going to follow the same style. The HD look works perfectly for this style; not so much for other films (and thankfully, Public Enemies is 35 mm celluloid). And do you really need an expostional set-up that Ricardo Tubbs knows how to fly planes? I think it's suitable to accept that his hobby (which it's cited as being in the TV show) would come in handy in his actual profession. Why is it so unbelievable that he'd own a plane?

As for the visual style and look of the film, I loved it. Just like I did with Collateral. I will dissagree with you on editing though. Some cuts were just terrible and stuff could've actually been cut out. BUT! I did see the director's cut which actually did make me think that some of the odd cuts and sound editing things I was seeing/hearing was because of that. Perfect example: early on in the movie when the guy steps out and gets hit by the truck, the sound of the truck cuts out to soon. You could actually hear the layers of sound effects in places. But there were also moments when dialogue was drowned out by background on-set sounds. Combine that with the fact that people were mumbling or trying to talk like they're super hard (Farrell especially) it makes it almost impossible to hear.

But some of the dialogue I did heard was not that great. I got this from IMDB here:
"That's not what happens. What will happen is... what will happen is I will put a round at twenty-seven hundred feet per second into the medulla at the base of your brain. And you will be dead from the neck down before your body knows it. Your finger won't even twitch. Only you get dead. So tell me, sport, do you believe that?"
All I could think about during that was "do you feel lucky punk? Well, do you?" And there was also the line in the first 10 minutes, "that is the hand we have been dealt at 11:37 o'clock"