Miami Vice

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

It sheds the series' famous and influential pastel look and plunges its cast of villains and warriors into the 21st century.

Village Voice Scott Foundas

Mann has done something transformative with Farrell: The Irish actor has never had this much charisma and natural authority in a role, and as he navigates that gray area between Crockett's real identity and his fabricated one, revealing subtle fissures in the character's cocksure facade, he's fascinating to watch.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

If you're looking for a crime story that sizzles with action, sex and the visceral jolt of life on the edge, Miami Vice is the one.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Miami Vice isn't an action flick but a neo-noir: tough, quiet, moody and hard.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

Sensual and scary, the movie is so visually textured you feel as though you're brushing against the screen.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Right away in Miami Vice you know you're waist-deep in movieland.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

While it never approaches the richness and gravity of a great Mann film like "Heat," Miami Vice blurs the thin blue line to similar effect, and he features a couple of bravura setpieces, including a tense raid on an enemy hideout and a shootout with chaotic, you-are-there immediacy. If only all summer movies were this majestically slight.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

It's a sensational trip -- gorgeous, gaga.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle.

Empire Simon Braund

Bearing all the Mann hallmarks, this is visually enthralling, relentlessly stylish crime drama. A little too languorous for its own good at times, but still vastly superior entertainment.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

It's the set pieces that mark the film as something special: swirling crowds at a casino in the opening sequence, Trudy's ordeal by trailer trash, a climactic firefight that puts lightning in the shade. Very impure, and very impressive.

Slate Dana Stevens

The world according to Mann is loud, dangerous, morally ambiguous, and more than a little greasy, but during the hours you spend there, there's nowhere you'd rather be.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The movie is seriously sexy and seriously entertaining.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

This is more of a thinking man's action flick -- a small, intense film made on a giant canvas that finds Mann experimenting with and pushing at the boundaries of mainstream filmmaking.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The two best words to describe the 2006 motion picture Miami Vice are "stylish" and "intense."

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

As entertaining as some of it is, is so cool that it's almost too cool. It takes the sin, and much of the juice, out of vice.

Variety Brian Lowry

Unlike most TV-to-movie transitions, Mann returns to his roots and delivers what amounts to a slightly overblown episode, brimming with style and characteristically short on substance.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Mann turns Miami Vice into an exploration of tone and mood, and he makes that enough.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Without the ability to move off the mythic, without the emotional texture that "Heat" created, it is a film easier to admire than to get passionately involved with.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

As it turns out, the movie is still very much about two well-dressed undercover cops who strike sexy poses, express plenty of attitude and drive expensive cars and fast boats as pop music plays on the soundtrack and palm trees sway gently in the tropical night.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It's got some great action sequences and is peppered with genuinely dazzling images. It's also subtly infused with Mann's favored themes of men-at-work and the high price of loyalty to duty. But it hasn't got sufficient meat to warrant its draggy length.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

A combination of muddy sound mix and players with heavy accents (particularly Chinese superstar Gong, who seems to have learned her lines phonetically) renders large swaths of dialogue incomprehensible, but the details of what's being said and done don't really matter.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

It's refreshing to hear some old-fashioned percussive tension in service of a director who knows what he's doing. Even when the screenwriter is losing his way.

Premiere Ethan Alter

Just when the plot should start coming together, the pacing goes slack and the narrative gets bogged down in routine cop-movie clichés.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Miami Vice is the last of the predicted summer blockbusters, and it delivers a reasonable amount of popcorn excitement. But if nostalgia for the TV show is the source of your interest, expect some disappointment.

Time Richard Schickel

Dark, detailed and only really gets going when the gunplay starts.

The New Yorker David Denby

It's about guns and sex and fast boats, and, baffling as it is at times, it's still the kind of brutal fantasy that many of us relish a great deal more than yet another aerated digital dream.

The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen

A darker, grittier creature that, while benefiting considerably from Dion Beebe's HD cinematography, is a frustratingly inert affair -- a long and talky excursion that fails to engage the viewer from the outset.

Newsweek David Ansen

It's filled with Mann's signature macho verisimilitude, but essentially it's the stuff of what, in saner fiscal times, would have been a B movie. Miami Vice delivers the thrills, atmosphere and romance it promises, but it doesn't resonate like major Mann.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Miami Vice, the movie, is an atmospheric muddle, as gorgeous and unintelligible as raven-haired stunner Gong Li.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Apart from a few sleek shots involving boats or helicopters, the action eventually devolves into a standard war-movie shootout.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

Farrell appears to be a rarity in undercover culture, a vice cop who goes on the lowdown as an Irish beatnik. Oh, that's a good disguise for South Beach. As for Foxx, he's still channeling Ray Charles through squinty eyes and a kind of shaky head. They have zero chemistry.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

It's the supporting players who stand out.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

Far from a disaster, but doesn't rank with Mann's best work.

USA Today Scott Bowles

All this movie has in common with its ancestor are speedboats, shotguns and drug-dealing Colombians.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

If you really must see Miami Vice (and you mustn't), buy a ticket to something better, then slip into "Vice" at the 95-minute mark and watch the last third of the movie. No one involved will profit by your curiosity, and you won't miss a thing of importance.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Perhaps vice isn't what it used to be, or maybe Crockett and Tubbs just aren't all that interesting when removed from their appropriate time slot, but this may well be the dreariest and most monochromatic time you'll have at the movies all summer.