'Vice' squad has its hands full

There's no shortage of action - or blood - in the anti-drug biz

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published July 28, 2006 at midnight

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On television, Miami Vice was always about seduction. The show, which helped define popular culture during the 1980s, survives in memory as a blur of Armani suits, oil-slicked hair, gold chains and pastel colors. It sounds trivial to call the show "trendy," although it probably started a whole wave of designer entertainment. Police work seldom looked quite so stylish and alluring.

That was then.

In bringing Miami Vice to the big screen, 17 years after the last episode aired, director Michael Mann - who plied his trade on the TV series - employs plenty of seductive elements. But Mann also toughens the movie, dropping us into a world in which a nicely concealed hand grenade can be a necessary accessory at a business meeting.

Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx take over for Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas; they're Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, and they parcel out sparse dialogue in the expressionless style the genre demands. Crockett and Tubbs are undercover detectives who can't afford emotional outbursts. Even the occasional smile seems to have become a luxury.

The story will be familiar to those who followed the series. Drugs - cocaine, heroin and more - are at the center of a conspiracy involving a drug czar (Luis Tosar) and a lesser henchman (John Ortiz). Crockett and Tubbs infiltrate the gang, run some drugs up from Latin America and try to work their way to the top of the crime chain by dealing and double-dealing.

The great Chinese actress Gong Li does her best English-language work yet, portraying a no-nonsense woman who works for the drug cartel. She and Crockett develop a relationship, and at some point you know she's going to discover that he's a cop.

Employing hand-held cameras and working in high-definition video (as he did in Collateral), Mann does a better job with direction than with a script that sometimes goes murky. But the movie delivers enough of the necessary goods to get past lulls, most of them involving scenes between Farrell and Li.

Li's performance warms and becomes more natural as the movie progresses, but Farrell (S.W.A.T., The New World) remains a bit of a mystery as an actor. He's not bad, but he doesn't quite energize the movie's center, something that becomes increasingly important as the screenplay begins to tip away from Foxx's character.

At one point, I even thought Vice would have been a whole lot nicer had Foxx and Farrell switched roles.

Still, some good small performances tend to compensate, notably from Ortiz, who understates his character's sadism, making it almost casual. He can talk about dismembering someone the way someone else might discuss gardening. And Tosar brings unquestionable power to the role of a man who has reduced his interactions with others to a frighteningly pure form of efficiency.

The action leaps around Latin America - Haiti, Cuba and Paraguay - which makes the material feel more expansive than it actually is. And there's plenty to look at: isolated jungle retreats where drug lords live in majestic repose and darkened nightclubs where carefully selected music electrifies every glance. At various points, speed boats skim over glistening night waters, and several scenes take place in some very spacious showers.

If the movie is any indication, the Miami-Dade Police Department - taking over a case from a fumbling FBI - has no shortage of funds. Crockett and Tubbs fly their own plane, drive spectacular cars and wrack up more mileage than airline employees.

In the movie's best action set piece, Crockett, Tubbs and assorted allies stage a rescue in a trailer park. Here and in other scenes, Mann lets blood splatter the screen in blunt, alarming bursts.

I wish that Foxx had had more to do and that the romance between Li and Farrell had had real resonance. But when Mann infuses the movie with criminal maneuvering, sex and speed, Miami Vice exudes the kind of gritty life we expect, so much so that you might argue that neither Crockett nor Tubbs deserves to be called a main character; Mann reserves that role for crime itself.

Robert Denerstein is the film critic. Denersteinb@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5424

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