I saw Michael Mann's Miami Vice yesterday. I enjoyed it. A lot actually. It isn't as good as Mann's own Heat or Collateral but it's definitely in the same mold.

One thing both of those movies do better than Vice is they add a bit more emotional weight to the story. Also, I think they give their lead actors a little more to work with. Look at Heat Mann spends a great deal of time building the relaitionship between Deniro's Macauley and Amy Brenneman's character so that when Deniro makes the choice he winds up making at the end you don't just feel anger at him but you feel her pain as well. (If you haven't seen Heat by now then I apologize but I tried to keep it vague.)

What's interesting is you could very well see some super Michael Mann movie starring characters from all of these movies because they are all built the same way. Driven, intense, professional, bitter, cold-blooded and very machine-like when it comes time to do what it is that they do.

Collateral's strength (and why Foxx got an Oscar nomination for it as well) is that for one of the few times in a Mann movie we the audience finally get our own character. Someone who's neither a criminal nor a cop. We finally get a character who is not so desensitized to the violence in the world and reacts with the same level of revulsion most of us would.

I mention this because Foxx's Tubbs is a completely different character than humble cab driver he played in Collateral. Well at least he seems to have a little bit more of a soul than Farrell's Crockett. We do see Tubbs can be as cold-blooded and lethal as any character in Mann's ouevre when the poop starts hitting the fan.

I think Heat and Collateral make the audience work a little bit more than Vice does. In this one you just kind of go along for the ride and that may be a good thing. I'm not sure how much I really want to get involved with any of these characters that goes for the cops, the feds and the drug-dealers. You walk out of Miami Vice almost wanting to take a shower, and I think Mann would take that as a compliment. Oddly enough there are not one but two gettin' kinky in the shower scenes in the movie, as if the characters themselves want to wash off the blood, sweat and gunpowder of their day-to-day lives.

While the overall cast is solid, I think a more name actor in the "bad guy" role really would have helped things. Heat worked because it had Deniro vs. Pacino (with the two only sharing two scenes) Collateral had Cruise vs. Foxx, Miami Vice has Farrell & Foxx versus -- wait let me go to IMDB to look up the actors who played the villains. Well, you get my drift. I'm not advocating casting a big name just for the sake of casting a big name but rather casting a proven solid name actor who can raise the stakes a little bit. Like, say Daniel Day-Lewis.

Overall, though, when the movie works it works quite well. The main shootout has been compared to Mann's own shootout in Heat. It doesn't quite reach that level but it is pretty intense. The immediacy of Hi-Def video really works well too during the above shootout you feel like you want to duck behind the chair in front of you in the theater (not that it would do you any good because Mann has no problems showing how violently bullets rip through just about anything. Including a man's arm.)

Miami Vice is pretty intense and for the sound alone I'd highly recommend seeing it in a theater rather than *ahem* waiting for Netflix. But you wouldn't be missing too much if didn't see it. How's that for a recommendation?