Miami Vice

The good news is that this movie contains one of the greatest gun battles I've ever seen on film. The bad news is that you need to watch almost the entire thing to get to the gun battle. Treating essentially the same subject as Michael Bay's underrated masterpiece Bad Boys II, Michael Mann manages to offer the audience considerably less in the "awesome shit" department but doesn't really add anything. The movie is shot and paced like it's a semi-serious thriller or something but there's actually nothing serious about it. Several characters -- including Jamie Foxx as "the black guy" -- are utterly zero-dimensional and certainly nobody gets a second dimension. The key love story is totally weird and non-credible, and it just doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that a film whose basic storyline involves a handful of local cops taking down a vast international drug cartel with a couple weeks' work is going to be fundamentally unserious (nothing wrong with that; again, see Bad Boys II) and shouldn't bother pretending otherwise. [spoilers]

No doubt, however, someone will someday decide that this was a brilliant deconstruction of the buddie movie concept. A white cop partnered with a black cop neither of whom seem to interact with each other in any way or have any sort of thoughts or feelings about the other guy. Indeed, the white cop could even pressure the black cop at one point into making a controversial decision (black cop backs his partner up) that winds up getting the black cop's girlfriend kidnapped, tortured, and badly burned by a bomb and -- or so it seems -- neither cop seems to react in any way to this awkward situation other than by redoubling their resolve to get the bad guys. It's pretty sweet. I have a more intense relationships with random people I run into a lot on the elevator.