“Smooth. That’s how we do it.” Amounting to around 60 seconds, the trailer for 2006’s Miami Vice is still one of the coolest-looking trailers ever cut together. Most of us have memories of trailers that left a particular impact. The legendary stories of Star Wars fans buying tickets for the iffy space opera Wing Commander, ... Miami Vice (2006) | A brief salute to one of the best trailers ever made
“Smooth. That’s how we do it.” Amounting to around 60 seconds, the trailer for 2006’s Miami Vice is still one of the coolest-looking trailers ever cut together.
Most of us have memories of trailers that left a particular impact. The legendary stories of Star Wars fans buying tickets for the iffy space opera Wing Commander, just so they could watch the first promo for The Phantom Menace. Then there was the wave of anticipation that surrounded the first trailer for Avatar when it appeared online in August 2009. It was, after all, James Cameron’s triumphant return to the sci-fi genre following Terminator 2: Judgment Day in the 1990s.
It didn’t have the same cut-through as those movies, but the debut trailer for Michael Mann’s 2006thriller Miami Vice was difficult to beat – at least in terms of style, precise editing and sheer coolness. Emerging earlier that year, it signalled Mann’s return to a pop cultural touchstone that had helped familiarise his name with a generation of TV watchers in 1984.
The filmmaker was executive producer on Miami Vice, a cop show that displayed the same mix of grit and glamour as his movies of the period, particularly 1981’s Thief and 1986’s Manhunter. Starring Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, the series was a ratings hit and ran for five seasons, its Jan Hammer synth soundtrack and aspirational imagery – white Ferrari, pastel suits, big yachts – etching itself into the 80s zeitgeist.
Twenty years on, his reputation continuing to soar thanks to the acclaim of Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Ali (2001) and Collateral (2004), Mann decided to direct a modernisation of that TV show, with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx taking over as Crockett and Tubbs, the trendily-dressed detectives busting drug rings around Miami.
At the time, it seemed like an open goal for Mann; he excelled at making tough, beautiful-looking thrillers about macho guys absorbed by their chosen professions. And when the trailer first started playing in cinemas, it certainly looked as though he’d made another sure-fire hit. Edited to the staccato rhythm of Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s rap metal song Numb/Encore, it provided everything you needed from a mainstream promo.
Quick cuts of guns being loaded, each click and rattle precisely timed to the drum beat. There were glimpses of Farrell and Foxx taking down perps in various locales. Farrell and Foxx prowling a nightclub. Leer jets cutting through a clear blue sky. Farrell at the helm of a speedboat, hurtling along the Miami coast. More guns. Terse chat about going so deep undercover you forget which side of the law you’re on. Explosions!
A second, slightly longer trailer (which is surprisingly hard to find online in any kind of decent quality) featured an ending that just doesn’t have the same impact viewed on YouTube. A white Ferrari soaring down a benighted road, its acceleration seemingly so volcanic that we’re left behind in its wake, the sound of its V12 engine rising to a deafening crescendo before the music takes over again. Duhh-duuhh. Duh. Duh. Duhh-duh-duh.
It made Miami Vice look like the must-see film of 2006. Which, regrettably, it wasn’t. Although critically reappraised to a degree since, it’s a lesser film than the immediate classic that was Heat, and is arguably a peg below Collateral, the thriller he previously made with Jamie Foxx (and which co-starred Tom Cruise, in a rare turn as a villain). The action, cars, boats and grit and glamour promised by the trailer were present and correct, but the plot lacked tension – hardly helped when the film pauses for several long minutes in the middle for a dreary romantic tangle – and the two leads curiously lacked the spark of Johnson and Thomas.
Mann and his collaborators also appeared to forget that, for all the machismo in the original TV series, it was filled with 80s kitsch. Crockett, after all, lived on a boat with a pet alligator named Elvis – a sure sign that its creators weren’t taking themselves too seriously. The 2006 film, on the other hand, dives in with gritted teeth, and there’s none of say, Al Pacino’s Heat outrageousness to offset the dour tone.
The original TV series also emerged in the middle of the MTV generation, when films – such as Flashdance – often looked like feature-length rock videos. Perhaps it’s inevitable, then, that Mann’s Miami Vice worked better as a trailer than a 130-minute movie: that promo is about the pure distillation of the show’s style over substance. It’s a potent droplet of adrenaline and cool – something the resulting movie simply couldn’t match.
Two decades on, and Top Gun Maverick and F1 director Joseph Kosinski is in the process of making a new Miami Vice. Himself a filmmaker who excels in creating pristine images, it’s easy to imagine him fitting right into the original show’s world of crime and dirty cash. He’s even setting it in the 1980s for maximum nostalgia appeal. What’s less easy to imagine is that his film will generate quite such an impactful trailer. To date, few thrillers have.
