BIGGER THAN LIFE PRESENTS: MIAMI VICE - 20^th Anniversary Screening

Michael Mann’s masterpiece of early digital cinema returns to mark its 20th anniversary with mojitos on the bar and an introduction from Bigger Than Life programmers Tom Grieve and Jim Laycock.

Originally released in 2006, Mann’s (Heat) update of his eighties television series Miami Vice stars Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx as Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, two undercover detectives investigating a smuggling ring between south Florida and Cuba. Naomi Harris features as a fellow cop and Tubbs’ girlfriend, Trudy, while Gong Li stars as Isabelle, the Chinese-Cuban wife of a trafficker of arms and drugs, who falls for Crockett’s charms.

Shot largely on early digital cinema cameras, Mann and cinematographer Dion Beebe embrace the limitations of the technology, adding digital noise to a palette of cool neon and ocean blue. The result is a film that looks and feels quite unlike any other, trading in romantic abstractions and impressionistic vistas that wrong-footed a lot of audiences and critics expecting a more conventional $150 million dollar Hollywood blockbuster.

Over the last 20 years, Miami Vice has been reclaimed and increasingly championed by a younger generation of writers and cinephiles drawn not only by the visual scheme, but a propulsive plot filled with Ferraris, jet planes and go-fast boats which speaks to themes of digital globalisation and yet finds time to prioritise moments of romance, delivered with an unusual seriousness and sensuality.