Miami Vice is the latest of Michael Mann’s glitzy crime movies and the most recent of his collaborations with Academy Award-winner Jamie Foxx. Do not be deceived by Miami Vice’s pedigree; those who expected another well-constructed movie along the lines of Collateral had best look elsewhere.

Foxx plays Detective Ricardo Tubbs and Colin Farrell is his maverick partner Crockett. Together they are going undercover to take down drug-dealing scum Jose Yero (Ortiz) and make time with his hottie girlfriend Isabella (Li). Crockett and Tubbs are the worst police ever. Never once during the entire movie did they take someone into custody or recite Miranda rights. They just blew everyone to pieces in fantastically gory ways. With their penchant for violence and Farrell’s scumbag appearance, a more appropriate title would have been Extreme Police: Take No Prisoners!

The conflict with any undercover police film is, how deep is too deep? When is pretending to be a criminal not pretending at all, but actual lawbreaking? (Ed. note: See Deep Cover.) Miami Vice tries to establish parallels between the better-adjusted Tubbs’ home life with his girlfriend Trudy (Harris), a fellow officer, and Crockett who despite being super-studly can only achieve similar domestic bliss while masquerading as a bad guy with Isabella. This is Li Gong’s first primarily English-speaking role and it shows. Often we are forced to wonder if she even comprehends what she’s saying and so, besides the mutual attraction of two gorgeous people, there is no chemistry for the star-crossed lovers and thus no real reason to believe Crockett would hesitate to betray her.

Miami Vice has yet a few more things working against it. The movie often seems to be a little out of focus, probably as a result of digital cameras. This worked well in Collateral but, for some reason, fails here, giving the movie the production values of something made for TV. Most annoying are the two or three segments of the movie that amount to music videos, where nothing takes place and the audience is serenaded by Audioslave. Here’s a tip: Pay the writers a couple of bucks to come up with some dialogue instead of filling out the movie with this trash.

It’s not as if Miami Vice was totally irredeemable, but everything halfway decent about it had been done better in other movies. Often movies created by the very same people. It just feels like laziness—Michael Mann resting on his laurels and hoping the appearance and charisma of his stars would compensate for it. And it just doesn’t measure up.

—Woodrow Bogucki