Miami Blues

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]

Even the breeziest Miami Blues scene can suddenly turn chilling.

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

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

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]

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