For those who had issues with Michael Mann‘s Miami Vice, or who so loved the fumes of it (like me) that it felt like perfectly calibrated adult escapism by way of a bad-ass drug-dealing movie, there’s an Unrated Director’s Cut coming on 12.5 that’s definitely a different deal than what played last summer in theatres.

How exactly? I talked about it with a couple of Univeral Home Video publicists today and it’s a little hard to describe. What it boils down to is that 7 minutes of never-before-seen extra footage have been added, making the Director’s Cut 139 minutes long compared to the 132-minute theatrical cut. But a lot of stuff has also been re-edited and/or shortened or recalculated — about 19 minutes worth, the publicists said. So if you add it up it’s got about 28 and 1/2 minutes of fresh stuff…in a sense. Or if you want to be a hard-ass about it, 7 minutes worth with some editorial reshuffling thrown in.
Put it this way: Mann obviously knew that the theatrical version didn’t work all that well with Average Joes, or not well enough, so he gave it another shot and what came out is a different movie, to some extent. It starts with a boat chase instead of a nightclub scene, for one thing. I was hoping there’d be more footage of Gong Li naked, but the publicists disabused me of that dream. Thanks, Michael…thanks a lot.