Yesterday Billy revisited his Frank 151 article on the 10 best movies that were shot in Miami. Here are the runners up:
BAD BOYS (1995): Yes, it's because of this film that virtually every movie, commercial, music video and photoshoot that wanted a "Miami look," was drenched in some horrendous orange-sepia toned filter (CSI: Miami, in fact, seems to think that's all they need to feel like Miami), but Michael Bay (a part-time Miami resident and one-time Miami Vice co-star) knows you need more to really capture Miami than just fancy camerawork. So he and producer Jerry Bruckheimer (another part-time Miami resident and also CSI: Miami exec producer) decided to shoot a movie about Miami cops in Miami. For truth, bro. I remember watching the opening credits sequence in a theater in South Miami in 1995, mesmerized. After spending my movie-watching life watching aerial shots of the same cities over and over again in the prologues of hundreds of films, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, etc., finally Miami was getting a turn.
BAND OF THE HAND (1986): From director Paul Michael Glaser (Detective Starsky himself) and executive producer Michael Mann, allegedly this movie began its life as a pilot for a potential TV series about juvenile delinquents who are plucked from prison, dropped in the middle of the Everglades to train with an old Indian and clean up a dangerous Miami neighborhood, much to the chagrin of a drug kingpin named Cream, with a theme song by Bob Dylan. No, seriously. Okay, it's no Heat, but it's entirely made in Miami and from Michael Mann himself, produced at the peak of the Miami Vice phenomenon in 1986.
MIAMI BLUES (1990): Before Alec Baldwin was an award-winning TV sitcom star, he was a young underrated movie star and he gives a strong tongue-in-cheek performance as a recently released con who restarts life posing as a cop in Miami with Fred Ward playing Fred Ward as a (real) grumbling cop hot on his trail. Released in 1990, it's a great coda to the decade of excess that defined us. Oh and did I mentioned Fred Ward was in it? I love Remo Williams!
THE SUBSTITUTE (1996): Our friend Alex Cabrera suggested this one and he's not all wrong. Tom Berenger stars as a mercenary who goes undercover as a substitute teacher at Miami Senior High School to kick ass and give detention and (spoiler alert!) take down a corrupt principal who's actually a big crime boss (Ghostbusters' Ernie Hudson). It's To Sir With Drugs. I was a senior in high school down here in '96 and times were different, but some of Berenger's methods would be suspect today (a male teacher installing a surveillance camera in the boy's bathroom at a Miami-Dade County public high school is a one-way ticket under the Julia Tuttle). To get a bit more Miami, Marc Anthony (one of 6,427 owners of the Dolphins) co-stars as a thug. While it spawned 3 direct-to-video sequels, none returned to Miami for production (lucky for us).