With its big-budget flash and style, Miami Vice charted new
ground for episodic television dramas in the 1980s, changing the way
such shows were conceived and staged, and no doubt laying the
groundwork for the directorial careers of folks like, let’s say, Charlie’s Angels’
McG. The big screen re-imagining then, starring Colin Farrell and Jamie
Foxx in the roles made famous by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas,
had many folks atwitter with anticipation. In reality, though, Miami Vice
is an incidentally titled, gritty travelogue and skillfully crafted but
surprisingly insular tale of parallel love stories — in other words, a
film dressed up and masquerading as a summer movie.

At its
center are Sonny Crockett (Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Foxx), and their
faithful band of ever-ready back-up (an underwritten group which
includes Justin Theroux, Elizabeth Rodriguez and Domenick Lombardozzi).
After the identity of an informant (John Hawkes) is leaked and his wife
killed, Crockett and Tubbs go undercover as courier specialists to
assist a high-up FBI agent (Ciaran Hinds) and determine the source of
the leak. This leads them to a shadowy Colombian drug and illicit
merchandise kingpin named Arcángel Jésus de Montoya (Luis Tosar) and —
perhaps to racially balance out the villainy — a homegrown Aryan group
that, for reasons never quite fully illuminated, eventually conspires
with Montoya’s quietly menacing middleman, José Yero (John Ortiz), to
kidnap Tubbs’ girlfriend, Trudy (Naomie Harris). Crockett, meanwhile,
falls for Montoya’s second-in-command, the poker-faced yet still sultry
Isabella (Gong Li), taking her up on her offer, mid-deal, to dash away
to Havana for mojitos. From here the petty incidents of gamesmanship
mount, with José’s perceptive distrust of Crockett and Tubbs eventually
culminating in bloodshed.

Mann’s world here is one of dark maneuvering and clenched, stubbled
jaws. He’s not interested in crafting a pop masterpiece, and there are
several types of truth with which he is wholly unconcerned — the
comfortable emotional track of narrative movie truth, certainly, but
also the truth of the mundanities of law enforcement. In Mann’s
idealized, stylized world of alpha male wolves on the prowl, police
work isn’t constrained by the necessity of paperwork, logistics or even
sleep — it’s a 24/7, multi-national hall-crawl, captured by
cinematographer Dion Beebe’s inscrutable, dirty frames and powered by
the lightly throbbing pulse of John Murphy’s score and lowly mixed
sonic offerings from Audioslave, Moby and Mogwai.

But for whom is Miami Vice made, precisely? Certainly not
hardcore devotees of the television show who have some nostalgic jones
for pastel blazers and Phil Collins tunes. (But then again, what sort
of these in-name-only adaptations of old small screen product typically
are?) Neither does it have the moral clarity of Saving Private Ryan, Seabiscuit or Cinderella Man, other adult-skewing films of recent summers. And Miami Vice
isn’t suffuse enough with staged conflict to sate the appetite of
general action audiences. An exciting and exactingly staged final
shootout punctures the movie’s mostly languid mood, but as the hearty
grosses of the mindless Pirates of the Caribbean sequel prove, casual summer audiences don’t go to the movies for
ruminative parables on violence and the difficulties inherent in
balancing dangerous, undercover investigative work with romance. Collateral,
which two years ago crawled across the $100 million mark only due to
Tom Cruise’s pre-couch jumping star power, had at its core the hook of
an Everyman thrown into a violent world with which he has no
familiarity or ease. If that film was Mann’s concessionary power play
in the direction of commercial relevance, Miami Vice comes
across on several important levels as a flippant clutch of the balls,
so densely atmospheric and deeply plotted is the film.

Ever since Heat, Mann’s films of the past decade — even a finely charted biopic like Ali — have been as much about the creation and sustenance of mood as anything else. (Maybe this is why he abandoned The Aviator, which in its hermetic subject didn’t have the inherent, sustained, hypnotic allure of Muhammad Ali.) Miami Vice
is no exception. While Mann’s visual and aural mastery of the cinematic
form and in particular Farrell’s laser-eyed intensity get you engaged,
one keeps waiting for a deeper sense of intrigue to set in — my mind
kicked around several interesting twists or narrative avenues that
never came to fruition or were explored.

I like that the film doesn’t conform to hackneyed clichés in service
of an attempted franchise launch, but can’t help feeling a bit
disappointed at Miami Vice’s deliberate murkiness, and the fact
that Farrell and Foxx are so divided and free of the bristling
masculine chemistry we want to see from them for much of the movie.
Drained of the juice that first made it such a visceral, cathartic
thrill, this film is Miami Vice in name only. Perhaps some deep undercover work is needed to find its mojo. (Universal, R, 132 mins.)