Miami Vice

Colin Farrell as Crockett.

Herald rating: * * *

Boy, the week we get MTV, Miami Vice turns up at the cinema. Talk about opening up a pop culture wormhole to the 80s.

The original Miami Vice got labelled "MTV cops" for its flashiness, its cut-to-the-music visuals and its habit of then-hip musical guest stars. Like Phil Collins, Glenn Frey and, lest we forget, Sheena Easton.

Of course, the new Miami Vice doesn't want to have much to do with the old Miami Vice - its opening music, a nu-metal reworking of Collins' divorce anthem In the Air Tonight, sure shows how much respect director Michael Mann is giving the original MTV/MV era and the series he helped create.

Mann's radical revision of his pastel-hued original blueprint has already been much discussed for not being a typical can-we-get-Ben-Stiller-TV-to-movie rehash. But if he's raised the bar for remakes he's also lowered the standard for something else - Michael Mann movies.

Usually, when he turns his big screen mind to crime - as he has done before in Manhunter, Heat and Collateral - something special happens.

Not much that special happens in Miami Vice. Sure, it looks and sounds quite like nothing you've seen in a crimeflick, though its nocturnal humid look - shot in grainy high-definition video - was trialled in Collateral.

Its visuals and the way it sounds means Miami Vice is big on atmosphere and exudes a palpable sense of menace throughout.

Trouble is, strip away Mann's trademark hard-boiled dialogue, his unsettling violent set-pieces and hardware collection - big boats, exotic planes - and the story beneath doesn't do justice to the pictures.

There's not a lot of difference in the plotting of this from a B-flick about undercover cops coming up against Central American druglords and finding themselves torn between the job and the women they love.

Farrell and Foxx make a robust new Crockett and Tubbs, even if they don't have much to say to each other and Foxx seems a little sidelined.

Despite obvious difficulties with her English dialogue, Chinese star Gong Li is alluring as the druglord's right-hand woman, pursued by an undercover Crockett.

But while that relationship subplot starts in a boat speeding to Cuba, it soon becomes an anchor dragging the rest of the film.

It has its moments - usually involving guns - and, like Mann's Heat, its involves one epic shoot-em-up of the highest calibre. But it doesn't leave much of an impression. If it wasn't called Miami Vice, you'd wonder what it was there for.

Verdict: Florida's best-dressed narcs get a visually impressive but empty update

Cast: Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell
Director: Michael Mann
Rating: R16 Running time: 134 mins
Screening: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas