“We are at the delicate interface between ocean and air … liquid and gas … the event horizon where molecules evaporate. This interchange is ethereal.” — Opening exposition from Michael Mann’s screenplay for
Miami Vice
[...]
Over time, what was initially enumerated as the film’s weaknesses have come to be viewed as strengths. The emphasis on gloomy atmosphere and visual sensation over the film’s (largely nonsensical) plot makes
Miami Vice highly rewatchable. There’s always something new to discover in
Miami Vice, in part, because of all the negative space that Mann leaves in the frame — contemplating the visual poetry of a gorgeously stormy sky or a speedboat slicing through an ocean vista takes precedence over caring about whether a dastardly white supremacist gang is planning to pull a drug rip-off. As
Vulture‘s Bilge Ebiri wrote last year, “At some point, you realize that what you’re watching is not a procedural. It’s a dream.”
Miami Vice has even influenced other films, most notably Harmony Korine’s
Spring Breakers, which extrapolates
Miami Vice‘s
“style is substance” aesthetic. “When I watch that film, I don’t even pay attention to what they’re saying or the storyline,” Korine told
the New York Times in 2012. “I love the colors. I love the textures.”