Vice probably would not have been in the same league as Collateral and certainly not Heat, but it would have been better had the script been shot as planned.

In the meantime, if I were a scholar in this field I’d definitely write about cable shows – after all, why not, right? – and possibly try to work out why it is that shows like The Wire are so brilliant and relevant. Is it the creative freedom? Is it the scope, the timeframe in which the stories are told? Is it that they are allowed to go out on a limb because they are (a little) less constrained by what having a massive budget entails? Is the different range of expectations and attitudes of a TV audience as opposed to a cinema audience?

Are you going to examine “Hard Candy” in the blog about sex crime films?
I’d be interested to read what you made of it.

I didn’t like Miami Vice either – it fell the wrong side of tedious. And
although Colin Farrell was obviously supposed to be a sex symbol, no man on
earth can carry off the mullet and ‘tache combo that they gave him.

Lizzie

I am quite interested in your project.
I developed a senior seminar a couple of years ago called Crime and
Justice in Film and Literature, and use film quite a bit in other
courses, such as Female Crime and Deviance, Women and Social Policy,
and others. If you’d like to exchange ideas about this, please let me know.
Robin

Is Mann’s slide from the sublime (Heat) to the pedestrian a sign that cop action has lost generic energy? In some ways, sure. The frequency of cop action releases fell nearly by half since 1998. From this century, I find myself enjoying just a few movies: Training Day, Insomnia, Narc, Hostage, and Inside Man, either because they were fun to watch (however offensive in their own ways) or because they disturbed me. (Caution: I’m making NO claim for their value to teachers of crime, urban life, or race relations). Now compare those to the classics from the genre’s peak years: The Untouchables, Robocop, Die Hard, Midnight Run, Blue Steel, Point Break, The Silence of the Lambs, Basic Instinct, Falling Down, Deep Cover, Thunderheart, Under Siege, The Fugitive, Speed, Seven, Cop Land, Donnie Brasco, Face Off, L.A. Confidential, The Corruptor, and Out of Sight. For just a decade or so (1987-1999), that’s quite a run. The movies of this century had far smaller audiences, and the hits will not be remembered as well. I mean, does anyone want to sit through Miss Congeniality again? Previous poster Claudio has a point about the ability of a cable show like “The Wire” to bring us more deeply into a story than most movies can these days. By the same token, “Deadwood” is more compelling to me than most classic or recent westerns. If feature filmmakers aren’t careful, movie analysts are going to jump ship and become cable analysts instead.

btw, to respond to Kat, a little less than half of the Hollywood cop action movies of the last decade are PG-13. That’s a new trend, which doesn’t bode well for connoisseurs of vivid cinema violence. Cop action has life in it still, but ain’t what it used to be.

I think it is pretty well established that movie genres have boom-and-bust cycles. Since cop action got started in the early 1970s with Dirty Harry, it has certainly had its boom. Maybe it is now heading into a natural state of dormancy. I’ll ask Neal King, the author of a terrific book on cop action, Heroes in Hard Times, to chime in on this discussion. He may have some useful ideas.

As for Kat’s astute observations about women’s roles in Miami Vice, I agree completely. That MV offers roles in which women are neither sluts nor addicts nor dead doesn’t redeem the film, but Kat’s message opens up a fresh way of thinking about MV and putting it in the broader context of changes in crime films.

Did you see the article on Jodie Foster’s role in Neil Jordan’s forthcoming The Brave One? (This is in The New York Times for 5 September 2006, p. B1.) Foster says she took the role because it offered a fresh type of role. It’s about “someone who’s been dealt a terrible blow and then reacts. Traditionally, when we see this happen with women, they turn it all inside. They allow themselves to be abused or they become alcoholics. But what if they turned it back outside–you know, ‘I’ll get you back’?”

Later in the same article, Foster is quoted as saying that she took her role in Spike Lee’s Inside Man for the same reason. “It’s not an attempt at preempting a male domain” but rather an effort to rethink a traditionally male role, that of the fixer, in women’s terms.

In a few weeks, I’ll be posting a column on Inside Man. It doesn’t deal with Foster’s character, so I hope that Kat will chime in again with some of her smart musings about the changing roles of women in crime films.

However, I was surprised by one thing that has seemed to go unnoticed in your review. In this MV, women take on a much different role than they did in the 80s. These women are not merely the objects convienent to a male fantasy (’damsel in distress’ or ‘hooker with a heart of gold’). The way the female characters unfold in this story is subtle – more an understated telling of a very different ‘femme fatale’. These women can be trusted; they do not manipulate when unnecessary. Isabella (Sunny’s love interest) is forthcoming with her ‘main man’ as she tells him ‘I slept with him (Sunny).’ Ricardo’s love interest is not crying and weak as she is saved, the minute she is rescued she is exploding with rage and anger and unleashes it on her assailant. And, neither of these women (not even the token female cop who we don’t know much about) DIE. This should not go unnoticed. This aspect itself places the film on a very short list.

Granted, the film was a little long; if it hadn’t included this unexpected, overdue and refreshing characterisation of the females in the film, I may have noticed more of what was missing. Certainly, the dynamics between Sunny and Ricardo do not lend themselves nearly as effortlessly to cliched, ‘it’s really a homosexual love story’ observation made so often about ‘buddy’ films. To say that this is ‘boring’ or ‘lifeless’ I think is to miss some of the more exciting possibilities it introduces for the genre of ‘crime’ film.

It’s certainly no Heat, but maybe it is approaching a serious story where women are more than just: the devoted blonde wife (Val Kilmer’s love interest in Heat), the ’so strong she’s masculine’ estranged wife (Pacino’s) or the ‘nubile innocent’ (DeNiro’s). Maybe it brings us a little closer to things we have yet to imagine.

…like a female buddy film that doesn’t star Sandy Bullock!

By contrast, American TV has been so strong in this area recently, and I am thinking The Shield as well as the incomparable The Wire, that I wonder if Hollywood is shirking this particular fight while it waits for someone to come up with the right language to make cop films that are both slick and relevant. (Apparently, you cannot do without the ’slick’ part.)