Vice without much grip

If you're expecting to see a big-budget reprise of the popular Eighties TV series, you'll be greatly disappointed with Michael Mann's movie. Gone are the campy spoofs, the over-the-top outfits and the pastel-shaded cinematography. Instead we have a deadly serious, stylishly noirish, but fundamentally insubstantial thriller.

Crockett and Tubbs, the debonair Miami undercover cops, are now played by Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, who mumble their way through their lines in a fashion that makes it virtually impossible to discern a good half of them. I've seldom seen a film that seems so determined to be naturalistic at the cost of comprehension.

John Murphy's throbbing, overlaid music makes matters worse, though the intricacies of the plot are such that, even if one could unscramble the words, it wouldn't be much help.

The duo are lured too deep into a botched FBI operation that results in the death of a key informant. The villains are a white supremacist group and a Colombian drug lord (Luis Tosar) who calls the shots from his jungle hideaway, and smuggling is the name of the game.

Crockett falls for one of the drug cartel's leaders, Isabella (the Chinese actress Gong Li) while Tubbs's girl (Naomie Harris) gets kidnapped. It's a messy business, but you know it will turn out mostly, if bloodily, OK. The trouble is that it's difficult to care, since Foxx is largely wasted and, though Farrell manages to make a better mark than usual, even under a fairly hideous moustache, his fling with Gong Li doesn't cause many sparks. Her difficulty in mastering English at least makes her speak slowly and clearly. But the superb actress of all those Zhang Yimou pictures is nowhere evident.

Those expecting an expensive and expansive Saturday night thriller may well find the film reasonably satisfying. But we know the original Miami Vice was lighter on its feet than this and we also know how good Mann can be when stretched by his material.

This is unoriginal in conception, tiresomely long-winded and, though directed with his familiar dark skill (watch the final shoot-out for sheer technical ability), nothing like as striking as either Heat or Collateral. It's more like Starsky and Hutch played with the straightest of faces.

Miami Vice
Cert: 15