Miami Vice

With its bright pastel colors and fashion and '80s pop soundtrack, one would have expected the new film version of Miami Vice to be another two-hour lame spoof probably starring Owen Wilson and Chris Tucker.

Thankfully, it's quite the opposite. Directed and written by the show's co-creator, Michael Mann, Miami Vice opens with Miami undercover detectives Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) learning of a high-level leak has led to the slaughter of undercover federal agents and the murder of an informant friend's family. Pulled into the case by the Feds, their investigation takes them straight to the doorstep of a group of Central American drug and weapons traffickers whose network runs worldwide, led by Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar), his second-in-command Jose Yero (John Ortiz) and Isabella (Gong Li), Montoya's mistress and money manager of the operation.

Crockett, Tubbs and their team works to infiltrate the group responsible for the deaths, but things begin to get complicated. Crockett begins a romantic relationship with Isabella, and for Tubbs, it's the provocation of wanting to get revenge for the deaths of his informant friend, his family, and an assault on a fellow team member whom Tubbs is involved with, Trudy (Naomie Harris).

In terms of story and character, Miami Vice is fairly routine police thriller material. We don't learn all that much about either Crockett or Tubbs aside from surface materials, and there are no big surprises or twists to be found in the plot as it heads toward its action-packed finale. Considering that Mann also wrote such crime genre winners as Thief, Heat and Collateral, you would expect something a little more complex and developed.

Then again, "deep" and "complex" were two things that the television series never were. Miami Vice has always been about style over substance, which is exactly what you get with the movie. A lot of directors would have been content with just that and tried to make as slick, and dumb, a movie as possible.

But Michael Mann isn't one of those people. He is one of the few filmmakers in Hollywood today that certainly knows how to make style substantial. His eye and ear for details regarding police and drug trafficking procedure and expert staging of individual scenes help elevate the material, and with the help of his Collateral cinematographer Dion Beebe (using hand-held High Definition cameras), Mann also creates terrific atmosphere and sustaining of intensity in the Florida night.

Foxx and Farrell make for a solid duo, even if their interactions seem a bit on the nominal side in terms of sentiment (cracking one or two quick jokes might have helped a bit). That missing emotion, and the film's areas of humanity and heart, can be found in the relationship scenes between Farrell and Li and Foxx and Harris. Tosar is a bit underused as the shadowy drug lord Montoya, but Ortiz is fun in a Scarface way as Montoya's underling. Ciaran Hinds and Barry Shabaka Henley are also good if a bit underused as FBI agent Fujima and Lieutenant Castillo, respectively.

Miami Vice may not be the most original or best movie that Michael Mann has made (that honor is a tossup between Thief and The Insider), but it is a fast-paced, gritty and involving action thriller that stands head and shoulders above much else released by Hollywood so far this summer.

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