Despite a mixed initial reception, Michael Mann's 2006 crime thriller Miami Vice actually saved the long-established franchise. Although very popular at the time, by the mid-2000s, breathed new life into Miami Vice, creating a gritty action thriller that stands up today as one of his best films.
When the Miami Vice TV series first aired, it reinvigorated the cop show format. Audiences had become used to cop shows that looked drab, like Hill Street Blues, but here was a series that looked bold and colorful. MTV videos were a key influence on Miami Vice's cinematography and production design; indeed, the elevator pitch for it was described as "MTV cops." However, as with any show seeking to showcase the state of the art, as opposed to aiming for timelessness, once the architectural styles and fashions on display in Miami Vice had fallen out of favor in the 1990s and 2000s, the corniness of many of its scripts and characters became apparent.
When Michael Mann came to Ali, Miami Vice featured his strongest, most apt utilization of it, due to modern technology's centrality to the plot. This tonal shift, coupled with bold directorial and stylistic decisions, provided an essential update to the Miami Vice series, revitalizing it for a modern audience in a way that has only improved with age.
A good example of the film having been more serious than the Miami Vice series lay in the characterizations of their respective informants. In the series, Izzy Moreno (Martin Ferrero), the informant usually used by Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson, nearly replaced by Mark Harmon) and Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas), was a laughable figure, whose hare-brained schemes were used to generate humor. This was in contrast to his equivalent in the Miami Vice film, Alonzo Stevens (John Hawkes), whose suicide upon hearing of the murder of his wife by Coleman's (Tom Towles) gang spurred Crockett and Tubbs to take down Coleman and his drug lord suppliers, Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar) and José Yero (John Ortiz). This death very early on in the film gave the viewer a good idea of the dark, moody, humorless film that was to follow.
It was this that set Miami Vice aside from goofier TV-to-cinema reboots from the same era Heat, which engendered a similar feeling of terrifying closeness to the action.
When one considers all this, Miami Vice's reputation as a failed experiment feels unjust. While it's understandable that audiences may have felt disconcerted upon seeing something very different from what they were expecting, Miami Vice transcended the limitations of its source material to become a mid-2000s rarity: a hard-boiled action film. Public Enemies proved a major disappointment, leaving Miami Vice as Michael Mann's best film of that decade.
