Miami Blues

That it manages to end a note that’s both deeply sad and sardonic only further makes its case as one of the finest forgotten films of its time, and one of the best, period. Read full review

The three lead actors all manage to be terrific without showing off—Leigh, in the course of an exquisite performance, does one of the best impersonations of a country southern accent I've ever heard—and the use of Miami locations is a consistent delight. The late Willeford wrote four Hoke Moseley novels, and this crisp, funny, grisly, and perfectly balanced adaptation makes me yearn for Armitage to film a few more of them. Read full review

MIAMI BLUES gleefully presides over the happy marriage of two solid but usually separate traditions in U.S. movies: film noir, with its emphasis on the sleazy and the powerless, and screwball comedy, with its celebration of the romantically eccentric. As darkly unpredictable as The Third Man and as bouncingly comic as Pretty Woman, Miami Blues deserves all the rave reviews it's going to get and all the tons of money it's going to make. [20 Apr 1990]

Not enough can be said about how good Jennifer Jason Leigh is in this movie. Read full review

Even the breeziest Miami Blues scene can suddenly turn chilling. Read full review

A brilliant comeback by a filmmaker, George Armitage, who never should have been away. Read full review

Tight, hilarious and - in its final shots - strangely moving, "Miami Blues" is a marvelously invigorating piece of work. [20 Apr 1990, p.3]

For all its commonplace ingredients, Miami Blues is uncommonly entertaining, thanks in large part to Ward, Baldwin and Leigh, who give gutty, energetic performances Read full review

The performance is a toure de force: Baldwin manages to make Junior very funny without sacrificing the character's scary, unpredictable edge. Quirkiness, not square-jawed heroism, seems to bring out the best in Baldwin,confirming Jonathan Demme's observation that "he's not a victim of his handsomeness." [23 Apr 1990, p.66]

So much love is devoted to creating the wacko loonies in the cast that we're left with a set of personality profiles, not characters. Read full review

This thriller is so gritty it could chafe your eyeballs...Miami Blues is high on its own malevolence. Read full review

This movie doesn`t have any greater meaning than offering a lot of amusing, troubling, quirky behavior. But that`s reason enough to see it. Read full review

Miami Blues is a neat little trick -- funny, tough, scary. This hurts to say, but it wouldn't be so bad to see a Hoke Moseley sequel. [20 Apr 1990, p.G5]

Miami Blues is offbeat and fun. [20 Apr 1990, p.E1]

A generally entertaining movie. Given the material, however, it probably should have been better - somehow, few of the scenes in the movie stick in the memory the way they do in Willeford's book. [20 Apr 1990, p.3F]

This quirky and sometimes brutally funny film strings together terrific moments but never takes a point of view. Read full review

Miami Blues is best appreciated for the performances of its stars and for the kinds of funny, scene-stealing peripheral touches that keep it lively even when it's less than fully convincing. Read full review

Certainly the going is grim, and there's nothing socially redeeming about "Blues" whatsoever, but writer/director George Armitage's movie is also funny, stirring and full of great moments done in the pop-arty, lightly macabre spirit of producer Jonathan Demme. Read full review

Miami Blues is just good enough to make you wish Demme would come back with Ward and direct another film based on Willeford's deceptively casual you-saw-it-here-first laser-beam vision of Miami as surreal American litmus. [20 Apr 1990, p.31]

Blues (hard-) boils down to a question of style in a movie spring when style is at a premium. I'm glad it exists, I wish it were better, and there'll be plenty of readers who think I've under- and overrated it. [20 Apr 1990, p.4D]

This is brutal, gory, at times downright sickening stuff, and somewhat twisted types are likely to laugh like a drain. Read full review

The plot is minimal, and no attempt is made to explain the psychology of the sociopath who murders casually and yet yearns for the security of middle-class life. But the movie's details are fascinating and often surprising. Read full review

Ward is physically fine for Hoke, Baldwin a wired Junior, and best of all is Leigh's hooker, but it doesn't quite translate to the screen. Willeford didn't write genre, and the film washes about a bit finding a tone. Read full review

What makes Miami Blues unsettling, in spite of itself, is the sense that the garish ultra-violence we're witnessing is just a species of high jinks. Armitage, adapting Charles Willeford's smart, nasty 1984 novel, doesn't provide the kind of moral dimension that might make Junior's sprees cumulatively frightening. The film careens along as a blithely funky shoot-'em-up. It might have been made by a sociopathic Chuck Jones. Read full review

Miami Blues is reminiscent of Demme's Married to the Mob and Something Wild. It has a superb sense of place. It savages Middle American tackiness. Regrettably, Miami Blues is even more mainstream and less developed than Married to the Mob. Its characters' lapses of logic and the holes in Armitage's script require a forgiving audience. The blood-letting at its conclusion necessitates a strong stomach. [20 Apr 1990, p.19]

What really sinks the movie, though, is Alec Baldwin’s strenuously awful performance. Read full review

Miami Blues is more interesting than any bad movie I've seen in months, but it is still a bad movie. Read full review