SCREEN

So it goes as well with Mickey Munday and Jon Roberts, cocaine middlemen who each spent about a decade in jail and seem none the worse for wear, their sun-drenched Florida looks and casual, easy demeanors bolstering their stories of excess and danger in the Miami depicted in Scarface and Miami Vice. Their jovial and entirely unrepentant attitudes suffuse the film, which might be morally disturbing if it weren't so much damn fun to watch.

Taking the glib attitude of his subjects and running with it, Corben uses stylized still photos (à la the Robert Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture), news footage and the occasional re-enactment to augment his talking heads, and tops it off with an original score from Jan Hammer, who wrote the music for Miami Vice and replicates its synth-heavy style perfectly here.

Corben is more interested in anecdotes than hard statistics, although he does give significant if not equal time to cops and news reporters to counterbalance the glamorous impression the criminals give of their activities. And even though the city's descent into bloodshed is presented as tragic, Corben also offers the refreshing perspective that the infusion of money and style during the cocaine years helped turn Miami into the hot spot it is today.

The moral equivocation suggests that Corben may be a little too enamored of his subjects, and the movie does drag on a good half-hour more than it should, bringing in too many underworld figures to keep track of. But it's hard to blame him—there's so much compelling material here, all of it salacious and dangerous and so enjoyable that you might just feel a little guilty afterward.