Miami Blues

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