Miami Blues (1990)

This film seriously has a screw loose, and thank God for it. It could have developed as a standard cops-n-robbers tale, and occasionally you can see traces of that well-trod path trying to push their way through the chaos. But George Armitage (and, presumably, the novel he's adapting) had other ideas. So what we have here is a crime drama in which both the crime and the drama are tangential to the character studies & deconstructions that are the film's real business. There's three main stock characters here (the Psycho Hood, the Dumb Hooker With a Heart of Gold and the Slob Cop Who Nonetheless Knows What He's Doing), but none of the archetypes emerge looking quite the same after Armitage has outfitted them with peculiarities and off-center outlooks and oddball dialogue. At times, it's like watching a David Mamet movie if Mamet ever got into a batch of brown acid. Whether it actually adds up to anything is questionable, but it's a hell of a lot of fun to watch anyway. Lunacy of this calibre must be respected.

Grade: B+