Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

If you are a fan of Michael Mann's films, Heat, for example, you'll like Miami Vice. That's the review. If you want real critiques, try this, or this, or this.

This post is not about the cinematic pros and cons of Miami Vice, however. It's about the film's language. Now, prior to entering the cinema last night, we were part of a crowd where the accents milling around ranged from German to North American to British to Middle Eastern to Asian. Our planet, more or less. Then came the film, which plays out in South Florida, Paraguay, Colombia, Haiti and Cuba. The challenge for the multinational audience last night was that the language spoken by the characters in all these places was a localized variation on English. On the face of it, then, a multinational audience should feel at home with such non-standard English, but there were a few complicating factors.

For instance, most of the speakers of the film's Colombian English appeared not to have spent years at the country's better finishing schools, so their grasp of the language's subtleties, such as intonation, were limited. They kept to their familiar Spanish syntax structures and modulation upon which they placed a basic English vocabulary, which made figuring out their intentions puzzling. Then, whenever Crockett (Colin Farell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) spoke American, they tended to drift into law enforcement jargon: "You're, like, talkin', 48 keys of H? That's, like, 12 mill. Know what I'm sayin'?" And all delivered fast, and inside a helicopter, or a powerboat, or a sports car doing Formula 1 things on the highway. Oh, almost forgot the love angle, which involves Crockett and Isabella (Li Gong), an Asian woman who was born in Angola but operates out of South America and speaks a completely original form of Chinese-American English.

But the most difficult moments of all involved the commercial transactions. These usually happened at night in deserted areas such as parking lots and docks. Which is fine, except that all the parties were under pressure and this affected their communication skills dramatically. They knew that their counterparts invariably planned to kill them as soon as they got their hands on the loot or the contraband so you got lots of barked verbs in a range of Englishes and then heavy gunfire. Whether the wounded and the dying reverted to their own languages or bravely kept on muttering "English" was impossible to filter through the sirens and the groans and the choppers and all.

In the end, one suspects, the language does not matter that much in Miami Vice. Does it matter in computer games? And millions enjoy those. The bigger issue for the linguists and the rest of us concerns the role of English as a lingua franca. Can the centre hold? If half of the verbal communication in a Hollywood film is impossible to understand for native speakers, what does that mean? Are the non-native speakers getting less, more? Or are they operating using visual clues, taking meaning from dress, posture and location? Which is a bit like reality, really. Are the non-native speakers getting less, more? Or are they operating using visual clues, taking meaning from dress, posture and location?