Miami Vice: no Glenn Frey, no sleaze, no go

Featuring the best use of digital photography I've yet seen in a blockbuster, Miami Vice does for undercover vice cops what United 93 did for 9-11: its purported realism dessicates the material. Feature films aren't documentaries. Art is transformative; it's certainly not mimetic.

Writer/director Michael Mann's film is a model of intelligent pulp; and pulp it remains. Its virtues are considerable: a couple of killer sequences (one in a trailer park will become a model of its kind) guarantee that this will remain the most action film of the year. Because it plunges us right into the narrative the film forces the audience to work; a lot of the dialogue is cop jargon and shorthand. The unsentimental conclusion is just right. You'd have to go back to John Ford and Antonioni to find another director so adept at finding topographic correlatives for his characters' isolation (geography, however, stumps him: I couldn't distinguish between Cuba, Jamaica, Columbia, and the Port of Miami). Mann doesn't just eroticize locations: he teases ambiguities out of them that his actors often can't project.

What about those actors? The only thing Miami Vice has in common with the '80s show is its pair of star cops, one black, one white, with the splendid names of Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs. Mann dispenses with the show's animated pastel-hued sleaze. He replaces Don Johnson's wiseacre sneer -- a TV recreation of how you'd imagine Glenn Frey would flirt with a waitress on the Sunset Strip -- with the glowering unshorn visage of Colin Farrell, who whether called upon to act feral or suggest various shades of lust is as expressive as a can of asparagus spears. As for the mullet, facial hair, and satin jackets, who the fuck is he kidding? He ain't gettin' laid in Miami dressed like a $70 pimp. The increasingly interesting Jamie Foxx, allowed to mouth the film's scant crumbly wisecracks, can barely look at his co-star (David Denby: "He keeps staring at Farrell as if he wanted more out of him and were having trouble getting it"). A brief scene in the film's first third (in which he says "You don't need to go home" with perfectly modulated rue) and several scattered bits allow Foxx the cast's only opportunity to suggest that police work is dangerous when it isn't ridiculous (did it ever occur to Mann, in thrall to his revisionist frenzy, to cast Jamie Foxx as Crockett? The mind recoils at the squandered opportunity). Gong Li, with whom Farrell has zero chemistry, is insolent and challenging; when she sizes Farrell up you've rarely seen such withering contempt. A shame Mann doesn't know what to do with her after the second act; but you know Mann is clueless when he puts Gong's Isabel and Crockett on a speedboat to Havana for mojitos and shower-fucking (if it was that easy to get to Cuba, then I invite the entire AGI team to meet me at Dinner Key tomorrow morning). The wonderful Justin Theroux (the besieged director in Mulholland Drive and the sadomasochist in one season of "Six Feet Under") is in there somewhere, but you need bifocals to see him.

This is the film's most damning feature: Mann is a director so enraptured by his own fetishes that he disregards what to him are ancillary concerns. Like: repartee! Women who aren't Lauren Bacall-Joanne Dru knockoffs! Decent soundtracks! He still hasn't topped The Last of the Mohicans and The Insider in my book, but for all his pomposity I urge him to keep trying. Mann's a perplexing cat, alright. He's got the pulse on a classic American theme: populating his oeuvre with characters consumed by their jobs (is there another director to whom ringing cellphones were more important?). He's great when he's operatic (The Insider) or rewriting source material (Mohicans).

As for Mr. Farrell, the prognosis is grim.