LGM Film Club, Part 504: Miami Vice
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So…I had never seen the 2006 film of Miami Vice that Michael Mann made. It’s a weird failure. Mann is a great filmmaker and the film looks amazing. Dion Beebe had just won the Best Cinematography Oscar the year before for Memoirs of a Geisha, but he at least should have been nominated for this. The film is just a extended version of a Miami Vice episode, with Colombian drug gangs and Crockett and Tubbs mixing their personal and professional lives in ways that would get them both fired by any real police agency, at least back when there was even the slightest claim to integrity in American life, which at least sort of existed still in 2006.
But the casting is beyond ridiculous. Jamie Foxx, who pitched Mann on the entire idea of making a film version of his show, is just fine. Colin Farrell as Crockett is not because he can’t find an American accent that works, so he sounds like a mess and sure he’s handsome and in some films he can be outstanding, but in other films he’s terrible that’s what he is here.
This gets me to the thing I can’t get over about this film. Why is Gong Li cast as a Cuban? Why in the living fuck would you cast a Chinese actor as a Cuban and not even attempt to explain this. For the first half of the film, I kept expecting some explanation of what was going on. But nope…I guess the assumption is that Americans are too stupid to tell the difference between a Chinese and a Cuban. And maybe they are! But her English isn’t that great for one thing, so she’s often hard to understand. Also, were there no Latin American or Latina actresses Mann could cast here? Uh, I think there were! I love Gong Li as an actor and she’s good here too, but this is a level of nonsense that is like Charlton Heston as a Mexican in Touch of Evil except that at least then a) the entire film world was still in Blackface or Redface mode anyway and b) there weren’t necessarily Mexican stars at Heston’s level. In 2006? WTF is this?
It’s the weirdest bit of casting I’ve seen in a 21st century film.