Ace Ventura: Pet Detective | Oceania, Sunny Isles Beach — The Balcony Roger Podacter Went Over

Roger Podacter goes off a high balcony and lands in the courtyard, and the police write it off inside a minute. Ace does not. He stands in the flat, works out that a man screaming all the way down could not have been heard through a closed sliding door, and slams it shut to prove the point. It is the moment the comedy admits it is also a detective film.

The tower is the Oceania at 16425 Collins Avenue in Sunny Isles Beach, on the barrier island strip north of Miami Beach where Collins runs dead straight between the Intracoastal and the Atlantic. When the crew shot here in 1993 this was still a low-rise motel coast, the last of the fifties neon still standing. In the two decades since, the strip has filled with glass towers thirty and forty storeys high, and the Oceania no longer stands out the way it did on film.

It is a private condominium, so you look from outside. Take the public beach access and walk north along the sand at the end of the afternoon, when the whole wall of buildings turns gold on its west faces and throws shade across the water. Find the balcony line, count up, and think about how much of that scene is one man testing a door.

Photo: the Sunny Isles Beach skyline. Wikimedia Commons.