Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

This week, Bruce Willis comes to Miami!

Episode 1.8 “No Exit”

(Dir by David Soul, originally aired on November 9th, 1984)

Tony Amato is a complete monster.

He’s an arms dealer, one who is responsible for machine guns showing up all over Miami.  When he’s not selling guns to drug dealers, he’s plotting to sell rocket launchers to terrorists.  He’s a crude and a violent man who has suddenly gotten very wealthy and who likes to show off his money.  He lives in a pink, art deco mansion.  He has a beautiful wife named Rita (Katherine Borowitz), who he regularly abuses.  Miami Vice wants to arrest him to get the guns off the street.  The federal government wants to arrest him so that they can get their rocket launchers back.  And Rita …. well, Rita just wants to hire someone to kill him.

Tony Amato is a memorable character because of just how thoroughly evil he actually is.  He’s a criminal because he enjoys it and it doesn’t bother him that his weapons can lead to innocent people dying. Tony is also memorable because he’s played by Bruce Willis.  This was Willis’s first credited acting role.  (He had appeared as an extra in a few movies before this.)  Willis got the role on the recommendation of Don Johnson, who remembered Bruce as being the bartender at one of his favorite New York bars.  Though there’s not a lot of depth to the role, Willis does get to show off the cocky confidence that would later become his trademark.

As for the episode, it’s dark even by the standards of Miami Vice.  The episode opens with a violent chase and gunfight in the streets of Miami and it ends, just as the previous episode did, with an abused spouse probably throwing their life away to get revenge.  We watch as Tubbs, Crockett, and Lester (Julio Oscar Mechesco) sneak into Tony’s mansion and manage to bug the place before Tony returns home.  They set up their survelliance operation on Crockett’s boat.  Of course, things pretty much fall apart as soon as the federal agents show up and demand to be allowed to oversee the operation.

While the Miami cops and the federal agents fight over jurisdiction, Crockett tries to help Rita escape from her husband.  He approaches her while she’s waiting to meet with a hitman and convinces her to let the cops handle it.  He promises her that he will put Tony away, even though he knows nothing is ever that simple.  Both Katherine Borowitz and Don Johnson do a good job in their scenes together.  Deep down, Crockett knows that he’s giving Rita false hope but he can’t bring himself to admit it.

Tubbs, once again, gets to break out his Jamaican accent as he goes undercover as a terrorist who is in the market for Tony’s rocket launchers.  Through Tubbs’s hard work, Tony is arrested but, on the steps of the courthouse, two new government agents demand that Tony be released because they’ve determined him to be a potential asset in their own Central American operations.  Tony smirks as his handcuffs are removed.  Rita appears on the steps, demanding to know why Tony is being set free.  She pulls a gun from her purse.  We got a freeze frame of Sonny shouting, “NO!” as a gunshot echoes on the soundtrack.  Tony may be dead (and we never specifically see whether Rita’s aim was true or not) but his guns are still on the streets, the people he sold to are still free, and the only person going to prison is going to be an abused wife.

Like I said, this was a dark episode.  This is one of those episodes that left the viewer to wonder why Cockett and Tubbs even bothered to make the effort.  In the end, all their hard work added up to nothing.  For Crockett, the case became about saving Rita but the government was more concerned about their own shady schemes that protecting its citizens.  Of course, even if Tony had been sent to prison, someone else would have taken his place.  That’s life in Miami.