God, I love Michael Mann.

I love him so much that even abuse from a “screening rat” couldn’t diminish my pleasure in his latest film, Miami Vice.You know what screening rats are, don’t you? They are creatures about two steps up from self-pissing derelicts on a street corner, and slightly less loathsome than cockroaches, though with the same nocturnal habits of feeding. Screening rats are the freeloading trailer park trash who attend advance critics and word-of-mouth screenings on free tickets passed out by radio stations. They arrive en masse, buy no concessions, eat noisily from their plastic sacks of CostCo bulk food, talk all through the movie, get into fights with each other, scramble after posters and t-shirts, and in general make it hard for the reviewers to do their job.

The rats, also called “Passholes,” are famous all across the country, from Seattle to Chicago, but they are particularly virulent in Portland, Oregon, for some reason. Most of them come from Gresham, an outlying city that is the identity theft capital of the world.

For Miami Vice I was at the Lloyd Cinemas, a Regal theater in what is called Northeast Portland, although that doesn’t tell you anything. Having had a minor altercation with another guy over the seating arrangements before the public, i.e., the “rats,” were let in, I moved to another seat. In the new chair, I was soon joined by the onslaught of rats, let in all at once (there are very few civilians at these advance screenings. The rats track down almost all the available tickets and power-pack the theater). The seat behind me was almost instantly occupied by a rat and what appeared to be his family. I was on the aisle and the guy right behind me kept kicking the seat. I figured that if he was doing this before the movie, it was going to be a nightmare while Miami Vice was playing. So I turned, after the 8th bump, and asked him as politely as I could if he could avoid hitting the back of my chair. The guy jumped down my throat, yelling at me.

Now, it has been awfully hot in Portland the last week, sometimes reaching 105. I’ve seen all sorts of incidents, from a bus driver turning into Dirty Harry to fist-fights in normally placid parks after 10 PM. So this fellow’s reaction wasn’t abnormal in context. But he was so virulent in his attack on me that I went and fetched the publicity rep. And it turns out that they knew each other — but this is only because the rats make it a point to memorize the names of the people who hand out the passes.

The patient rep asked him to move; the guy went ballistic again, yelling, saying “Not gonna happen,” and then to me, “You want to go out side and settle this?,” and then pleading to the rep, “You’re gonna believe him and not me?” and calling me fatso (which was the pot calling the kettle black, as this fellow was lugging an extra person in his gut and had a square head not unlike a block of limburger cheese, only with a Russ Meyer mustache in the middle).

I was saying nothing; Limburger was escalating it all by himself. The rep said, “Now you have to leave.” After arguing for another two minutes Limburger said, “I’m just gonna go,” acting as if it was his decision leave, to preserve what shred of dignity he had left.

What was funny about this was that we were about to see (now thankfully without Limburger) a film full of the kind of masculinist posturing that makes Saturday afternoon action films such invigorating fantasies for boys. Here, Colin Farrell plays Sonny Crockett, the part made by the underrated Don Johnson in the seminal 1980s NBC series that Michael Mann produced (but didn’t create nor direct). Jamie Foxx is Rico Tubbs, his partner in undercover drug busting in present day Miami. The two spend a lot of time in the film flashing hard looks, posturing, and moving with efficiency when the tension breaks in front of their drug dealing nemeses, who flash and posture back. It’s a sort of tango.

You’re either going to like the posturing or not. I liked it, especially some nice large hole-creating head shots, which put me in mind of Limburger. The sound in either the print or the theater was bad so the dialogue was hard to hear, but the movie is almost a silent film anyway, and the pace is deliberate. I suspect that a lot of people are going to fine it slow or boring.

Miami Vice is shot like Collateral, in high def digital video that leads to somber cityscapes and beautiful skyscapes. Parts of the film were shot in Miami just as Katrina and other storms were on their way and the sky often has an ominous and thick cast about it, with lightning spiking down (I assume that it is real lightning, not CGI effects). Skeptical viewers are going to find the weather more dramatic than the actors. This is a very muted action film, with both lead actors mostly withholding. I especially like the patented Mann shot, with the camera held close to the rear right or left of someone as they walk. He uses it about five times in this movie and the shot is always effective, really bringing you into the action.

This is the second time that Mann has gone to the well of TV work to fashion a movie. Heat is a masterly re-filming of his TV movie, the 1989 Crimewave (AKA L.A. Takedown). In essence, what Mann has done here is re-write the end of Heat. In that film, crook De Niro and cop Pacino have a face off on a busy airport runway in a sequence that left a lot of people unsatisfied. Here, in a similar situation, a character makes a wholly different decision, and it is indeed much more satisfying. Thus, both because of their roots and because of their contrasting resolutions, Heat and Miami Vice are paired films in Mann’s filmography. Mann tries to balance two entirely different moods, absolute quotidian realism on the one hand, and romanticism on the other. This time he may have got the ending right.

Personally, I liked it quite a bit. A suspense scene in a trailer park (which must have felt tres familiar to the hoard of screening rats in the auditorium) had me on edge. And I like Mann’s silent men. The movie is well cast in all its subsidiary roles. Mann takes a page from Tarantino and casts an Asian woman, Gong Li, as the right hand CEO. John Hawkes and Ciarán Hinds also appear, and fans of The Wire will enjoy seeing Domenick Lombardozzi in a similar role.

But it is not Miami Vice the show. There are no flashily stylish clothes, no sessions where the plot stops to indulge in a rock video sequence. It’s a very focused if dense film with no subplots. But I like the director’s Mannerisms; they do for me what movies are in part suppose to do: make me feel good after a trying day.

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