Miami Vice

Running for five seasons and 111 episodes on NBC between 1984 and 1990, Miami Vice was a show that helped rewrite the cop television show. Splashy, stylish and colorful, it not only rewrote the genre but more importantly helped re-energize the genre. The impact is easily seen in just about any police procedural released in the years since. So what's the follow-up? Well, naturally an unnecessary film adaptation, 2006's Miami Vice.

Working on a sting operation of a prostitution ring, Miami-Dade police officers Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) are called away suddenly when a former informant they've used calls them, talking wildly of a case among all sorts of nasty folks has gone seriously wrong. That case -- with FBI, DEA, drug cartels, Aryan Brothers, and many more involved -- goes poorly quickly, but Crockett and Tubbs get pulled into it as well, the longtime friends and detectives choosing to go deep undercover to hopefully pick up where the previously botched case left off. Can they somehow pull it off? The odds are stacked against them, and if things go poorly again, they've no one to get them out of the situation but themselves. And with all sorts of unsavory sorts involved -- including a potential leak within a government agency -- nothing is easy about this undercover case.

What a mess of a movie....and that's coming from someone who likes the finished product almost in spite of itself. This 2006 adaptation comes from director (and writer/producer) Michael Mann, an executive producer of the original television show and the director of Heat, Collateral, Ali, Last of the Mohicans and several others to his name. The film went way over budget, filming was less than pleasant with some cast drama, and it received middling to poor reviews. The criticisms are all valid with the main one being pretty obvious. Mann wrote the script...if it existed. It's hard to tell. Slow-moving scenes broken up by some intense staring and then a shootout extraordinaire finale. And yes, to repeat, I like this movie.

Story is overrated to the point of being unnecessary in Mann's film. Above all else, S-T-Y-L-E is key. He filmed in digital, giving 'Vice' an equal parts gritty, in your face look with a more polished, clean look. Filming locations in Florida, the Caribbean, Uruguay, Paraguay, they look phenomenal. This is a movie that doesn't have that overall clean, blockbuster feel. It is shot in the darkness and shadows like we're watching the real thing take place. You add in an eclectic soundtrack with everything from Audioslave to Moby and a lot of others mixed in along with a soft, almost trance-like score from composer John Murphy, and the little things come together nicely. Mann's ability as a visual director is never in question in my book. His movies look great and he composes shots with ease and talent, making it look almost effortless. The problem is when it is all style and basically no story.

I've seen a handful of the original Miami Vice episodes -- my parents watched it -- but I know the gist of the show. Mann decided to go out on a limb in many ways, but most importantly, in terms of character. Crockett and Tubbs are friends, buddies, partners in arms. Farrell and Foxx's version? There's decent chemistry between the two Miami-Dade detectives, but we're given no character/relationship background at any point so it's hard to root for them. Farrell gets far more screen-time (rarely a bad thing) as apparently Foxx was incredibly difficult to work with on-set, but it doesn't amount to much. Instead of flesh and blood characters, we get stylish anti-heroes, cops who know how to look cool, how to do a slow-motion walk like a champ, how to walk away from an explosion, how to have menacing conversations where nothing of said is of actual significance. Oh, and yes, I still liked this movie.

This ain't a cop story. It's a stylish, quasi-artsy cop movie with some odd detours, especially Farrell's Crockett falling hard for Isabella (Li Gong), an international drug dealer's right-hand woman. They go to Cuba, dance, drink and make sweet, passionate love in an extended sequence that accomplishes little. Meanwhile, Tubbs watches out for Trudy (Naomie Harris), his girlfriend and member of the team. Cue shower and sex scene! There is some charm in the Crockett/Isabella story, a doomed relationship that you know won't end well. Mann knows a doomed anti-hero better than anyone and Farrell embraces that character, the moody, almost sullen cop who begins to question what he's doing and the lengths he'll have to go to. I just wish there had been even a little character development other than passionate dance scenes and lots of meaningful looks and intense glances among characters.

Who else to look for? Along with Harris, the Crockett and Tubbs' team includes Justin Theroux, Elizabeth Rodriguez and Domenick Lombardozzi with Ciaran Hinds and Barry Shabaka Henley as two key superior officers. John Ortiz is excellent as Jose Yero, a cartel middle-man who suspects Crockett and Tubbs aren't what they're claiming with Luis Tosar as the drug czar hidden away in the Central American jungle. Also look for John Hawkes and Eddie Marsan in small parts.

So in the end, what can I say? I liked the movie. It's cool. Even though it takes itself far too seriously and has absolutely no sense of humor (there's maybe 3 smiles in the entire movie), it is fun. I thought Farrell was pretty good and carries things through its slower portions, especially with his dreamy hair and epic mustache. The style is cool, Mann assembling it all with ease in almost effortless fashion, albeit at the expense of the story. Things build nicely to a bone-thudding finale as an all-out war breaks out on a dock in the dead of night with heavy-duty automatic weapons tearing the silence open. The ending itself is weak, just kinda ends and boom, CREDITS! It isn't a very good movie -- more Blackhat than Heat unfortunately -- but I found myself entertained throughout. A measured final say.

Miami Vice (2006): ** 1/2 /****

The World's End

With 2004's Shaun of the Dead, director Edgar Wright and co-stars and real-life friends Simon Pegg and Nick Frost put themselves on the pop culture map. Three years later, the trio proved they were no flukes, releasing the equally funny and the underrated 2007 flick Hot Fuzz. Well, it took the three of them a couple years -- as in six years -- but they've released the third movie in their unofficial trilogy, 2013's The World's End.

It's been 20 years since Gary King (Pegg) and his four friends celebrated their last day of college with an epic pub crawl, the Golden Mile, that tries to cover 12 different bars around Newton Haven, the town they all grew up in. The celebration went awry though, Gary and Co. only making it about halfway through the crawl. Now in his early 40s, Gary never really moved on with his life -- ever the partying college student -- and now he wants to do one thing above all else; finish the Golden Mile. Gary meets up with the rest of his friends who's he drifted away from over the years, Oliver (Martin Freeman), Steve (Paddy Considine), Peter (Eddie Marsan) and even Andy (Frost), his former best friend he had an epic falling out with, and convinces them all (some more willing than others) to reunite and try to pull it off. It's been years though, and there's something going on in Newton Haven that none of them could see coming.

I really liked both Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz so when I read there was another film in the works from Wright, Pegg and Frost, I was excited to see where it went. Then, I saw the trailer which I'll link to below at the end of the review. It starts off decent enough if in some familiar territory about college friends reuniting to take on the world in a way. And then it happened in a flash. SPOILERS STOP READING SPOILERS The quintet stumbles onto some sort of alien replacement invasion, the town they grew up in drastically changed in ways they could never have anticipated. What?!? My first thought was simply "That looks incredibly dumb," but then I realized I had a similar thought about both 'Shaun' and 'Fuzz.' The third time wasn't the charm here, the talented trio coming up short with their third film.

What's the biggest detriment to its success? Quite simply, I didn't find it very funny. It just doesn't have enough laughs to recommend. Sure, there are some funny moments spread out over a 110-minute flick, but not enough to sustain the energy throughout. I thought too -- trying to go in with an open mind -- that the genre-bending story of five college buddies reuniting with a possible alien invasion was oddly brilliant in an out of left field, random fashion. It never molds together though, never finds that right balance between the two and in the end falls short because of it. At different points, it reminded me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (loved it) and more recently, The Watch (hated it). I wanted to like it just because of the talent assembled working together, but I didn't. It's a comedy without the laughs unfortunately.

If there's something that helped me get through 'World,' it is the casting. Even with a script that wasn't necessarily entertaining, the talented cast makes the most of it, specifically the quintet. Pegg as Gary King starts off as a truly obnoxious character (intentionally so), one I was worried would single-handedly handicap the story. As we learn more about him, he's still pretty grating, but there's a certain idiotic charm to his quest to complete the Golden Mile. Not surprisingly, the best thing going is the dynamic between Pegg's Gary and Frost's Andy, a more than frayed former friendship as Gary left Andy out to dry years before, his drinking/partying/drugging breaking up the friendship. Now, Andy either wants to give him one more shot, whether it's to end it once and for all or to see if Gary has changed. The dynamic among the five is fun, Freeman's Oliver a buttoned-down real estate agent, Marsan's Peter a beaten down husband, and Considine's Steve going through a bit of a mid-life crisis.

The best moments come from the group, Pegg and Wright's script effortlessly showing what a friendship would be like this. The group has plenty of history, the script giving them plenty of chances to show off that subtle comedic timing, the dialogue pretty snappy throughout as these friends must band together to get through that hell. Also look for Pierce Brosnan as a former teacher, Rosamund Pike as a former love (oh, yeah, love triangle!), and Bill Nighy providing his voice in a key role late as things come together.

I'm disappointed. I wanted to like this movie. I did like the cast. There is a charm, a style with its goofy cuts and hyper-fast editing and zoom-ins on random objects, but it gets bogged down. Not enough laughs, the message in the finale trying desperately to save things. The finale does provide a good twist in its random darkness which provides a bit of a saving grace but not really enough to save it overall.

The World's End (2013): **/****

Jack the Giant Slayer

Let's give credit where it's due. Disney has done its best to make fairy tales at least moderately politically correct, but there's something that is often odd, unsettling and pretty uncomfortable about them. Weird to dulled down to....well, movies have gotten their greedy paws on the genre again, making them action movies? From Snow White to Jack and the Beanstalk, they're all ripe for the picking, like 2013's Jack the Giant Slayer.

Living in the kingdom of Cloister, a young farm boy, Jack (Nicholas Hoult), has grown up idolizing the legend of an ancient king, Erik, who saved the kingdom from the wrath of man-eating giants. Unfortunately, living with his uncle on his small farm in the countryside, Jack doesn't seem destined for any sort of heroic deeds or royal crown. Selling his uncle's horse though in town through an odd set of circumstances, Jack comes into possession of a bag of small beans....powerful beans (oh no!). That night, Jack is stunned to find the king's daughter, Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson), on his doorstep, but in a driving rain, he loses the beans and they immediately sprout up, blasting away to the skies....with Isabelle in tow. The next morning with help from the king, his men, the Guardians, and the treacherous Lord Roderick (Stanley Tucci) along, Jack climbs up the immense beanstalk to the land between Heaven and Earth where the giants reside. Can they rescue Isabelle in time?

A solid performer at the box office upon its release this spring, 'Jack' earned almost $200,000,000 in theaters. It's easy to see why. It takes a familiar story -- Jack and the beanstalk -- and has some fun with it, injecting a whole lot of energy via lots o' action and cool characters. Getting it to theaters proved to be not to easy, but director Bryan Singer does a very capable job in the end. It's tightly paced, running an action-packed 114 minutes, and never gets too bogged down in any one scene or character. If there's flaws....and there are....it's hard to have too much of an issue with them because we're onto the next scene with the snap of a finger! Composer John Ottman's score is a good one too, a big, booming fantastical score that fits in well with the non-stop action.

Box office success considered, it's all that more impressive because there isn't one huge headlining star here. There's no one that screams out "GOTTA see this!!!" Good actors just the same, but no sure thing. Start with Hoult, the young English actor who holds his own as the titular Jack. He's a teenager growing up, not some muscle-bound hero. Most importantly, Hoult's meek nerdiness plays well, and he's very likable. One of my favorite actors currently working, Ewan McGregor is clearly having some fun as Elmont, the captain of the king's guard, a tried and true and very capable warrior. The always fun, always reliable Ian McShane isn't given a ton to do as King Brahmwell, the aging ruler who worries for his daughter's well-being but must measure it against the well-being of the Kingdom and his people, but it's Ian McShane, just go with it. The same applies for Tucci, a great actor who makes the most of his part as the greedy, power-hungry Lord.

Playing the damsel in distress who...........gasp.......likes Jack (how could this be?!?), Tomlinson is decent as Isabelle, but she simply isn't given enough to do. Shallow guy mode, but she's a cute princess so that's good. Eddie Marsan plays Crawe, Elmont's fellow guard and a longtime friend, while Ewen Bremner is a solid backup villain as Wicke, Roderick's equally treacherous accomplice.

Enough with the positives, bring on the negatives! As fun as some of the characters are, you don't always feel especially connected to them. It's a fun, diverting script but the focus seems to be entirely on big, broad strokes of characters and the spectacle of what we're watching. Character development? Eh, overrated. My biggest concern (on top of those things) was what I'd seen in trailers, what appeared to be an overindulgence of computer-generated special effects. Yeah, I was spot-on there. While it was filmed in the English countryside, it never feels/looks like it. Just about every scene feels like a very polished, very at a distant CGI shot. It gets repetitive, and the giants look tolerable I suppose, but it's not the highest of quality CGI. Bill Nighy lends his voice talents to play General Fallon, the leader of the vengeful giants. For me at least, CGI is best used in small doses that fits in effortlessly with a story. Not the case here where basically the complete visual look of the movie depends on the CGI.

That said, I thought the movie was a lot of fun. The backstory of how the giants ended up in their purgatory above the clouds is pretty cool, and the adventures to said purgatory provide for some cool backdrops to the story. It's always fun, always exciting, and the finale with the giants descending on Cloister and Brahmwell's castle is quite the wrap-up. Sure, there are times I wish it connected a little more, giving us more investment in the characters or the story. 'Jack' can be a little heartless, feeling like we're watching from a distance at times, but I'm not going to get too analytical here. It's fun. Enjoy it, and DONE.

Jack the Giant Slayer (2013): ***/****