The Austin Butler Gun Show continues

Sun’s out, guns out as Austin Butler continues his sleeveless parade in Los Angeles, showing off his biceps as he prepares for Joseph Kosinski’s take on Miami Vice. We’re just watching Austin get his pump on because so little else is happening in the dog days of celebrity summer. Except celebrity deaths, which, quite frankly, can take the next few weeks off.

The latest in Miami Vice news is that Danny Ramirez is joining the cast. This is especially fun casting because Ramirez grew up in Miami and is a huge University of Miami fan—he just spoke at their commencement earlier this summer. So, it’s casting a hometown hero, but it’s also Joseph Kosinski calling up one of his Top Gun grads, as, of course, Ramirez starred in Top Gun: Maverick. The Grand Unifying Theory Of Maverick is real, that film is going to become legendary as a foundation stone for a generation of top talent, not unlike Starter for Ten collecting James McAvoy, Alice Eve, Rebecca Hall, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Dominic Cooper in one place just before their careers really took off.

I’m too young to have enjoyed Miami Vice’s heyday on television, but I am a fan of Michael Mann’s 2006 film starring Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, and Gong Li, mainly because I am a huge fan of Michael Mann. He executive produced the TV show back in the day, and when he tackled the material himself, Mann turned it into a meditation on loneliness and duty, and he really dug into the show’s theme of “the war on drugs is a huge failure doing material harm to society” which gets lost under the style and action of the series. Mann, however, drags that to the forefront of his film.

Kosinski’s film I expect to be a return to style and action above all else, mainly because that is what Kosinski does best. Not that his films are all empty spectacle, they’re not—Maverick has a very timely theme about the value of human expertise in a technological age—but Kosinski is a visuals guy first and foremost.

And he’s casting his film for visuals, putting together a wildly attractive cast. I hold Michael Mann’s work in high regard, I’m not especially interested in non-Mann takes on Miami Vice, but I can already tell this film will win me over on hot boys alone. Throw enough hot boys onto the screen, and I will grade on a curve out of the kindness of my heart and the horniness of my soul.