YMMV / Miami Connection

• Angst? What Angst?: Jane is only mildly upset that Mark killed her brother. She doesn't even break up with John over it even though it's indirectly his fault.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Friends (Forever)". So awesome and 80s-tastic that it became the end credits music for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.
  • When not rocking out, the soundtrack features a neat electronic score by Jon McCallum.
  • And let's not forget, "Against the Ninja."
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: So many in this movie due to its Random Events Plot, the best example being the beach scene as it has absolutely nothing to do with the story, yet it's treated as this exciting montage.
• Broken Aesop: The film ends with the message, "Only through the elimination of violence can we achieve world peace." The problem is the band solved all of their problems through violence.
• Dawson Casting: Presumably, Mark is supposed to be one of the Dragon Sound members attending the University of Central Florida. There's just one problem. Y.K. Kim was forty-one years old at the time and the film never specifies if he's intended to be the same age as the rest of Dragon Sound (all of whom appear to be in their 20s) or if he's just an older guy who decided to go back to school. The members of the band seem to treat him as if he's the same age, though he does sometimes come off as a bit Papa Wolf.
• Ho Yay: There's a whole lot of homoeroticism between the members of Dragon Sound. They're five guys who live together, go shirtless through most of the film, and sing about what good friends they are. In one scene, Jim walks around with his pants unzipped and shirt off, proclaiming that he's going to use the shower. In another scene, Mark goes around feeding grapes to the other guys. Also, only one of the guys has a girlfriend.
• Memetic Mutation: Y.K. Kim's cumface◊
• Narm: Jim ends up a frequent source of this, due to his actor seemingly interpreting acting "emotional" as squealing out his lines in a high pitched, loud voice, which makes him come across as rather flamboyant and goofy in supposedly serious scenes. Most prominent is his overwrought, tearful monologue about his missing father, which is not helped by the fact that he is shirtless and has his fly wide open the entire time.
• Padding:
  • The band's trip to the beach serves no particular function, and the establishing sequence goes on twice as long as you'd expect.
  • The biker party serves no other plot function than to establish that Hashito is aware of Dragon Sound's existence. Otherwise, it appears as though the filmmakers were simply impressed by the antics of the bikers and decided to add them to the film.
  • The demonstration of Y.K's defense skills against an attacker armed with a knife goes on for far too long, and makes it an obvious Chekhov's Skill Foreshadowing for the climactic fight.
• Questionable Casting: Let's just say that the guy playing Jeff doesn't exactly make the most convincing gang boss.
• So Bad, It's Good: The acting is awful, the plot is nonsense, and there's long stretches of random scenes that have nothing to do with anything — all of which is likely responsible for its new cult following in the 21st century.
• Special Effect Failure: Of a kind—the actors portraying the band Dragon Sound have absolutely no idea what they're doing when they're on stage pretending to play their instruments. The worst offenders are definitely the guitar players. They grip the necks of their guitars with no fingers on the strings at all and just run their other hands over the bottom half of the guitars at random. It's even worse during the only guitar solo because the actor's terrible fake-playing is front and center. But it's also what makes the movie So Bad, It's Good. You cannot watch them fail at fake guitar playing without laughing at least once.
• Tear Jerker: In spite of the Narm of the scene, and if the father subplot wasn't so forced and poorly-handled, Jim's monologue about his father could count as this to some people, especially to those who have experienced Parental Abandonment themselves.
• Unintentional Period Piece: A group of Taekwondo-trained orphans who play in a college synthrock band fight against a drug ring of biker ninjas? Only in The '80s could such a premise ever be green-lit and played with a straight face.
• Vindicated by History: The movie was harshly received when it was first released and was only in regional theaters for two weeks. Now, it has become a cult classic, with one critic saying that it has a nice and goofy charm to it, even though it makes The Room look like an Ingmar Bergman film.
• The Woobie: Poor Jim. His mother died when he was young and his father was missing for most of his life. It's quite heartwarming to see that he has finally found his father but later takes a dark turn when he gets injured by ninjas along the way. Thankfully, he gets better and meets his father in the hospital...although his over-the-top bawling undercuts all that.

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