Miami Vice (film) - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Response to Miami Vice has been split. Miami Vice received positive notices from major publications including Rolling Stone, Empire, Variety, Newsweek, New York, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, and film critic Richard Roeper on the television program Ebert & Roeper. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis declared it "glorious entertainment" in her year-end wrap-up and praised its innovative use of digital photography.

The film received negative reviews from The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, focusing in part on comparisons with the 1980s series and on the plot.

It was included in the top ten of 2006 by Scott Foundas (LA Weekly) at #7, and by Manohla Dargis at #8. Additionally, in November 2009, the critics of Time Out New York chose Miami Vice as #35 of the fifty best films of the decade, saying:

Writer-director Michael Mann brilliantly rethinks the seminal 1980s TV series on which he made his name. The hi-def videography gives a tactile, scorching sense of the characters’ surroundings, and Colin Farrell and Gong Li’s doomed love affair bears the full tragic brunt of Mann’s mesmerizing on-the-fly narrative.

On Metacritic it holds a 65 "Generally Favorable Reviews", while on Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 48% "rotten" rating. However, it also holds a markedly higher 70% "fresh" rating from Rotten Tomatoes' Cream of the Crop reviewers.