"When you have a skill that permeates every aspect of your life…"

Michael Mann said that in a Miami Vice related interview but he could have been talking about the characters from any of his films. Look at Frank in Thief, Will Graham in Manhunter, Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna in Heat, Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider, Muhammed Ali in Ali, Vincent in Collateral. Mann's men are technically proficient. They live in narrow, specific worlds, but within those worlds they are the masters.

Miami Vice opens loud, the Jay Z/Linkin Park mash-up a perfect metaphor for the entire film. Mann is a master of atmosphere, and from the second the film opens we never question it. In this movie, Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) aren’t buddies. Buddies play golf together. Their relationship is deeper than that.

These two operate on a level where their lives depend on one another. They are not allowed a misstep. The relationship between them can best be summed up by the brief scene where Tubbs questions Crockett’s involvement with Isabella (Gong Li). Crockett assures his partner he knows what he’s doing, to which Tubbs simply says, “I’ll never doubt you.” It’s the kind of thing that probably doesn’t need to be said, a simple vow bonding them together.

Miami Vice is not the first time Mann has adapted one of his TV projects to the big screen. Heat was a bigger, darker, better version of his 1989 television film L.A. Takedown. Miami Vice feels like an episode of the series the director always wanted to make. The scope of cinema allows for a more penetrating examination of these characters, and the film has a level of violence and brutality that would never be allowed on television, especially television of the 1980's. The tone of the film is dark, the action visceral and unsettling, but it is also peppered with the television-like clichés betraying its origins. The script is fairly tight but it is hampered by an overall problem with pacing, the film feeling longer than it actually is.

The biggest problem with Miami Vice is its inconsistency. There are moments we have seen too many times, like when Crockett and Tubbs first meet international drug runner José Yero (John Ortiz). It's that scene where everyone has their guns drawn, pointed at one another, ready to fire, but some quick wit from the hero calms things down. Sex scenes, which Mann usually does well, have a porno rhythm here – exposition, fuck, exposition, fuck – complete with cheesy music. Farrell is generally good as Crockett, but he has a redneck drawl to his voice that seems to come and go.

One has to wonder how much Mann is like one of his own characters, how much cinema permeates his life. He is obviously technically proficient. His characters always have the best tools, just like he does. In his commentary track on the Collateral DVD, Mann says the experience of making that film made him a High Definition (HD) convert. The HD works in Collateral, picking up layers of night that might not have been otherwise possible.

Contrarily, the HD in Miami Vice is inconsistent. There are shots that are sharp, and there are some, mostly in night scenes, that are grainy. There are some really slick shots, and there are others that look like they were done on someone's camcorder. It’s hard to speculate how intentional this is, but there are several moments where the camera is almost too present.

In every Michael Mann film, there is at least one scene standing above the rest. The bank heist shoot-out in Heat. The nightclub assassination scene in Collateral. Those are just two amongst many. The most intense scene in Miami Vice, the one validating the price of a ticket, is when, late in the film, Crockett, Tubbs and their crew go to rescue one of their own, Trudy (Naomie Harris). They go in as a team, and as such the sequence does not belong to any one person. The chemistry is at its zenith here, the violence at its most unsettling. This is the kind of scene Mann does best and it is worth the wait to get to it. While smaller in scale than the film's climactic shoot-out, this rescue mission is the film’s highlight.