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The Home Invaders: 'Miami Vice' ep #19 (1985)

Dir: Abel Ferrara

The first of Ferrara's two "Miami Vice" (once the hottest, hippest show on TV) directed episodes is an average "Vice" episode and it's barely distinctive as a Ferrara project.

A 'Crew' of exceptionally violent 'Home Invasion' robbers is causing havoc in Miami.
The regular "Miami Vice" characters (lead by Don Johnson's 'Sonny Crockett') join up with the Robbery Division to try and catch the criminals before someone is killed.

Leading the Robbery team is Sonny's old mentor Lt. John Malone (Joe Pantoliano), but Sonny's boss, Lt. Castillo (Edward James Olmos) rubs the Robbery team up the wrong way when he criticises their investigation……..

Unlike his work on the excellent "Crime Story" pilot, where he had a longer running time and an as yet un-established show to make his mark on, Ferrara was basically just another director for hire on "The Home Invaders". "Miami Vice" was nearing the end of its first season, guidelines had been laid down and, even this early on, a blueprint for how an episode would be presented was in place.
In such an environment no director can really add much of themselves to a project.

The only really unusual aspect of this episode in fact is that the other main character in the show, Sonny's partner Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas), is not in it due to Thomas still recovering from an injury sustained on a previous episode.
To followers of Ferrara's work the only link is a tiny role for Paul Calderon ("King of New York", "The Bad Lt.") as one of the robbers, but cult film fans will also recognise David Patrick Kelly ("Twin Peaks", "The Warriors") as the leader of the armed gang.

There is a harder edge to the regular night time sequences then normal (again a sign of Ferrara's love of the city streets is in evidence) because of the intense atmosphere of the investigation due to the robbers being so violent, using torture and hurting children are just two of their habits.
It's also a more aggressive episode in general due to the brief, but very rough, treatment of the robbery victims, and you do get some feeling of Ferrara's often violent movies in these (sadly very truncated) sequences.
The look of the gang is the other point of interest as they wear white hockey masks (though only half face ones) which will be familiar to fans of "Miami Vice's" Executive Producer Michael Mann as he used them himself in his TV heist movie "L.A. Takedown" and it's superior, expanded, big screen version "Heat".

Otherwise there is little that stands out here, though there is one small but effective concession to humour, in the otherwise serious script (by "Crime Story" co-creator and ex-Cop Chuck Adamson), when Sonny and Castillo have to chase down a fleeing old woman in her sports car, but the main highlight is the excellent performance by the ever intense and just so damn cool Edward James Olmos who, after arriving late to the series, turned Castillo into one of the show's major strengths.

Music is of course provided by Jan Hammer, but his score in this episode is mostly background music that drifts by unnoticed and there is sadly no use of contemporary songs (bar a radio playing in a salon) that became one of the show's most famous attributes, which is a shame as Ferrara has shown he can use library music and/or specially comissioned songs very effectively
And sadly the finale, that seemed to promise much gunplay, is rather too abrupt in the action stakes.

So, there is nothing here to make the viewer sit up and shout "It's Ferrara's work all right" and if you did not know which episode was directed by him you may have trouble picking "The Home Invaders" out as the one. But it's still a solid enough "Miami Vice" episode, helped by the strong playing of Olmos, and is certainly nothing to be ashamed of.