Miami Vice Review

In the mid-eighties, they epitomised cool but are TV cops Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs still relevant in the 21st century? Let's find out as writer / director Michael Mann serves up a cinematic slice of "Miami Vice".

Totally updated to the modern day, this gritty outing sees Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) going undercover to try and blow apart a drugs cartel run by a South American gangster Montoya (Luis Tosca). But the deeper they go, the more the lines between right and wrong start to blur, especially when Crockett finds himself getting involved with Montoya's right hand woman Isabella (Gong Li).

There's no doubt that Michael Mann is a very good director - his CV includes the likes of "Heat", "The Insider" and the excellent "Last Of The Mohicans". But you can't help but feel that his long-held ties to "Miami Vice" - he served as an executive producer on the original show - may have blinkered him slightly here. Sure, it is very competently directed and stylistically quite reminiscent of "Collateral" in places, but you can't help but wonder what the real point of the film is? The 'cops infiltrate drugs cartel' certainly isn't anything new, while the South American drug lords are caricatures at best. Perhaps "Miami Vice's" biggest problem is that fact that, thanks to some classic Farrell mumbling and an excessively loud soundtrack, the dialogue is pretty hard to follow, leaving the audience struggling to fill in the blanks when it comes to the plot. And because most of the action centres on Farrell, his Oscar-winning partner is left kicking his heels for far too long.

A real disappointment, you're better off sticking to DVDs of the original show.