I was only four years old when Miami Vice was on television. Considering the fact I'm a huge 24 fanatic, I probably would have enjoyed the show if I'd been born 10 years earlier. When I was twelve years old, my father took me to Universal Studios Florida. After all we enjoyed all the rides, we watched a Miami Vice Live Action Stunt Show (which took place in the now vacant Old Lagoon). The show had had spectacular stunts on boats, jet-skis and from what I can remember even involved a helicopter. There was gunfire and huge explosions. It was a very fun show. I always assumed that the television show was probably the same kind of fun. Again, I'm not sure, I've never seen it.

Michael Mann's big screen adaption of Miami Vice is not fun. In Fact it's boring.

I saw the film at an advance screening where the lady next to me fell asleep in the first half an hour. When the film was over, the crowd booed at the screen in anger. I have never seen this before, especially at an advance screening, where usually mediocre movies tend to get good reactions (I think this has to do with the free ticket combined with the fact that the people are excited to see something before anyone else).

The Miami Vice Live Action Spectacular contained more action than the movie's total action sequences combined. Running at just over 145 minutes, this film eeks by slower than the tortoise from that old fable. The first hour of the movie contains almost no action what-so-ever. Everything is saved for this realistic bloody battle which takes place near the film's end.

What was Michael Mann thinking? This is the same director that brought is Collateral, Ali, The Insider, Heat and The Last of the Mohicans. This film feels like a bad film school attempt. Even the transitions between scenes and the music cues feel out of place. I'm usually a huge fan of Mann's work. His frantic camera is always catching something original. Mann likes to take chances, and usually it pays off. In one love scene in a shower he stays on an extreme close-up of the woman's hair stuck to the back of her neck.

The screenplay gives you no reason to like or care about Colin Farrell or Jamie Foxx's characters. Mann is banking on the fact that the audience will like the characters because they know what they're doing. They talk in long drawn out sentences relating technical police talk that you have no interest in. There is a love story that develops between Farrell's character and the girlfriend of a big drug-lord they are working undercover to expose. In fact, the plot leaves nothing at stake until one of the last sequences.

Miami Vice should be taught in the UCLA Screenwriting program in a course titled "How not to write a script."