The linen suits and pastel shirts are long gone, but there's still a strong whiff of boys' own adventure in Michael Mann's highly entertaining update of his own TV series. Undercover cops Crockett and Tubbs (Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx) are back to doing what they do best, infiltrating a global drug smuggling ring. In their leisure time, they zoom around in a souped-up Ferrari and bomb along the coast in speedboats. It's like the 80s never went away.
Michael Mann has come a long way since his days supervising Miami Vice on TV, and it's fascinating to watch a filmmaker of such extraordinary ability working a slice of pure cheesecake like this. Miami Vice today is a glorious blend of neon-lit noir, bafflingly complex police procedural and glossy magazine. Farrell, providing a perfect macho template for teenagers everywhere, is on brooding form as the troubled Crockett, who divides his time between shooting the bad guys and mooning over Gong Li's haughty gangster's moll. Mann's action sequences, shot largely on digital video, are painfully exciting, and there's a superb sense of place. You can almost smell the pork and beans in the Cuban episodes, and even a simple shot of a flying jet gives you a dizzying sense of the infinite sky.
"A SLICE OF PURE CHEESECAKE"
There are flaws, of course. Foxx is surprisingly dull, much of the plot is downright incomprehensible, and as usual with Mann, there's nothing approaching a sense of humour. But you won't see prettier gunfights all year.