"Miami Vice" a drab affair

Substance places a distant second to style in the big-screen version of "Miami Vice," which sees respected filmmaker Michael Mann returning to the scene of the crime series that so effectively defined a decade.

Gone are the pastel threads and the night-soaked neon that played such a big part in the show that was born of NBC Entertainment chief Brandon Tartikoff's simple yet wildly successful "MTV cops" concept.

In its place is a darker, grittier creature that, while benefiting considerably from Dion Beebe's high-definition cinematography, is a frustratingly inert affair -- a long and talky excursion that fails to engage the viewer from the outset.

Those in the market for some of that old Crockett-Tubbs camaraderie are bound to be disappointed by the Colin Farrell- Jamie Foxx model, in which the two actors appear to be engaged in a contest to determine who can appear more morose while expending the least amount of energy, especially in terms of their own flat exchanges.

Maybe it had something to do with that Miami heat, but the languid results likely won't be much of a tonic for the summer's lackluster box office -- pirate pictures excepted.

In updating the series, which ran from 1984-89, writer-director Mann has moved beyond the trendsetting South Beach color scheme and into murkier waters for this story that pits undercover vice cops Sonny Crockett (Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Foxx) against nasty international drug traffickers.

Drawn into a world of sophisticated cartels, the two face off against Aryan Brotherhood thugs and a beautiful but tough Chinese-Cuban money launderer (the latter played by not always easy to understand Gong Li), but Mann's writing keeps getting in the way of his direction.

The picture takes a stylistic cue from his previous film, "Collateral," also lensed by Beebe. But where that L.A. nocturne so effectively ratcheted up the tension, "Miami Vice" merely ratchets up the pretension, with too many potentially explosive sequences just ending up hanging there like the Florida humidity.

All the stilted dialogue -- more like the sentence fragments standing in for dialogue -- certainly don't help the actors' cause, especially those for whom English is unmistakably a second language. But even in silence Foxx and Farrell fail to generate any convincing buddy cop chemistry.

Taking advantage of the larger canvas, Mann expands the scenario to include stops in Uruguay, Paraguay and the Dominican Republic (which doubles for Haiti), but for all the cosmopolitan intrigue, "Miami Vice" just doesn't go anywhere interesting.Even the music, which played such a key role on the TV series, is a letdown here.

In the absence of Jan Hammer's propulsive original theme, composer John Murphy's anonymous score and song contributions by the likes of Moby and Audioslave fail to reach the mood-setting heights of Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight," updated here in an uninspired cover by Nonpoint.

While costume designer Janty Yates' steely, monochromatic Crockett and Tubbs duds are certainly in keeping with the grainier tone, it just ain't "Miami Vice" without those immortal powder blue or lime green sports jackets.