Sex, Drugs, Guns, and Fast boats

I was in middle school when Miami Vice first appeared in living rooms across America. I was too young to know that it was a watered-down version of what could be in an R-rated feature film. But what even a young girl could recognize was that it was something visually, musically, sexually and dangerously more than anything else in prime time. I might have been a good girl, but at 13 I would have given my virginity to Phillip Michael Thomas in a heartbeat. Everything about the excess was attractive and repulsive at the same time, but it sucked you in. It was cutting edge, it was seductive.

But if you've ever caught a rerun, it's dated. It's pink. It's the 80s. It's a cliche now. Its time-capsuled. So when I saw they were making a remake--I was like, whatever. You know remakes--they're not good. They try to recapture something and usually end up feeling like a spoof. It's sad. And that guy from the Phone Booth is no Sonny Cockett.

But yesterday, I was reading the New York Times, a paper that is pretty hard to please. The review was actually pretty favorable. I mean, the guy had to slip in that it was a "gratuitous" film. Well, duh, it's Miami Vice not Schindler's List. Not every film is going to add significant meaning to the world. But the reviewer also said, "Miami Vice is an action film for people who dig experimental art films, and vice versa." Plus, it mentioned the on location filming: Paraguay, Brazil, Colombia, Haiti and on and on--oh, and of course Miami. So, I had to go see it. I had to see if they could really translate that feeling I got at 13 to something a adult could feel at 34. I had to see if Michael Mann could bring Crockett and Tubbs out of the 80s and let me believe in them again. I wanted to be washed over by the music and the images and the sex and the revulsion and the seduction all over again, but in something now. I didn't want them to recapture the 80s. I'll never be 13 again. I wanted to feel like a grown-up and I wanted Miami Vice to feel like it had grown up, too.

Damn. They did it. It was a wild, sexy ride. You were undercover and you wanted to stay there, but you had to get out. It was too big, too vibrant, too hot, too rich, too dangerous. You knew you couldn't stay, but it sucked you in. It was what Miami Vice had always wanted to be--on the big screen, for an adult audience. The film became the drug, so sometimes, it even hurt a little. Yeah, it was gratuitous. It's an escape. It's a drug. It's intoxicating and dangerous.

Once you've seen it, you can check out the adult-only portion of the website and learn not only about the actors, film-makers and cinematography, which was by the way, intoxicating in itself, but about the drug trade, and many of the other vices controlled by cartels around the world. You get facts and figures on the demand-side, as well. About the young mothers doing crystal, about the eighth graders trying cocaine--about why this all goes on and on. Because part of the what makes Miami Vice so seductive and repulsive is that knowledge that as over-the-top as this big-budget, fictional thrill ride might be, underlying it is a violent, dangerous, incredibly addictive, unbelievable lucrative and ultimately destructive truth.