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Miami Vice (2006)

Miami Vice. Feature film. (2007, 140 mins) IMDB

...a terrible movie despite the budget and talent...

D

uring the 5th minute I thought of shutting the DVD player off and say: "Forget this movie". That doesn't happen often and I probably should have.

The opening credits are so small with such poor contrast as to be unreadable. Is that what they wanted? Why bother putting up credits if no one can read them? How stupid.

The opening sequence is a bunch of big, fast boats racing across the water. It's meaningless and boring because it's done without any context. Who's in the boats? Why? We don't know so we don't care.

It gets worse. Shift to a packed nightclub with that pounding music and flashing lights. Who enjoys that type of scene? I hate those types of scenes, yet they persist.

This is followed by a meet and great. Drug sellers and drug buyers. The buyers are accused of being informants. Out come the big guns, .50 cal guns, whereupon the informants are literally shot to pieces. Who needs to see this? Why?

I'm into the 16th minute and I'm thinking of stopping it.

I know Miami Vice was a TV series but I couldn't tell you a thing about it except the obvious. It takes place in Mimi and it deals with cops, vice squad, chasing drug dealers.

That's what's happening in this film. There's nasty drug dealers, informants whose cover has been blown and our two heroes are called in to figure it out.

The film is about women with fake tits, guns and violence. Fast cars, fast boats. All without any purpose.

It's a lame film.

The very first image on the screen is white text on black saying this film has been edited from its original release. I thought it was one of the notices to say it'd been shrunk to full screen. This was a first. Realizing what was going on and seeing the running time over 140 minutes, my immediate thought was self-indulgent and now I say lazy. It takes work to fit a story into 120 mins. It's lazy to let it run long.

There seems to be every nationality involved in these drug deals except Canadians.

And what's with Colombians speaking English with each other. Ugh. It just doesn't happen.

Thankfully there was a fast-forward button and it worked. Sometimes certain DVDs don't allow the FF to work.

Posted 2009/05/09 at 21h12ET in Movie Commentary.

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