Miami Vice

Rated 2.0

In writer-director Michael Mann’s update of his 1980s TV series, undercover cops Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) go after a drug kingpin (Luis Tosar)—while Crockett goes after the kingpin’s mistress/business partner (Gong Li). Lingering ’80s nostalgia (and the critics’ adulation of Mann) probably will buy this one a pass, but it’s a near-total dud, dragging on and on for 132 minutes with less story than the series used to handle in an hour. There are some riveting shootouts, but in between it’s all sluggish pacing, mumbled dialogue and musty clichés. Farrell and Gong have little chemistry, and Farrell and Foxx even less. Dion Beebe’s cinematography is sharp and gleaming one minute, and fuzzy and cheap-looking the next, and that inconsistency is typical of the whole miscarried production.