The main 'Vice' is sex in this Miami muddle

Can Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, viceroys of sex, drug-busting and rock-and-roll, the hottest cool guys on the planet during the neon '80s, rule mojo-and-mojitos Miami in the luminaria-lit new century?

The answer gets lost in the sauce of the big-screen version written and directed by Michael Mann, executive producer of the TV classic.

Miami Vice, the movie, is an atmospheric muddle, as gorgeous and unintelligible as raven-haired stunner Gong Li. The legendary Chinese actress is Isabella, the brains and beauty of a drug cartel infiltrated by Our Heroes.

Mustached and soul-patched, Colin Farrell's Crockett looks like Davy with the coonskin on his face. Goateed and edged like a topiary, Jamie Foxx's Tubbs resembles a metrosexual Malcolm X. Where stubble once reigned, facial hair now runs amok.

Mann, the stylish and unpredictable filmmaker whose credits include The Last of the Mohicans and Ali, conceived his low-light, high-speed affair as a modern-day Pirates of the Caribbean. The line between virtue and vice is blurry when narco-traffic cops try to bust narco-traffickers before falling in love with them.

There's always been an undercurrent of eroticism in Mann's films. In Miami Vice, it's a sexual riptide. This is the film's chief appeal. Crockett and Tubbs are undercover cops in both senses of the expression.

Mixing business with pleasure, Crockett beds Isabella, the pouty Cuban-Chinese goddess who believes the cop is a drug transporter. Tubbs has sister detective Trudy Joplin (Naomie Harris, voodoo-island queen in Pirates) as his work/playmate.

Sex in showers. Sex on dance floors. Sex in sacks from Miami to Havana. One would have to go back to the '70s for a film with such sultry, mutually gratifying couplings.

As for the rest of the movie, let's just say that the body language Mann elicits from his actors is comprehensible. Not so their spoken language, which largely consists of sentence fragments and oracular mumbles. Li is a commanding actress who lacks a command of English. Likewise Spanish actor Luis Tosar as Montoya, a drug lord with a face as unreadable as an Easter Island statue and a growl almost as undecipherable.

I'm still scratching my head over Crockett's moody observation that "Probability is like gravity." Also, Tubbs' remark: "There is undercover, and then there's which way is up?" For much of the film there is as gaping a disconnect between character and dialogue as there is between Crockett and Tubbs, whose chemistry is limited to their female co-stars. Farrell is woefully insular; Foxx, grievously underutilized.

Shot in digital video by Dion Beebe, who also shot Collateral, Mann's L.A. nocturne, Miami Vice promises to be more influential in its visuals than in its fashion style.

Digital requires less light than film and produces a grainier, more realistic effect, which suits this movie down to its litter-strewn pavements. The Beebe-Mann collaboration yields some spectacular landscapes. Imagine a cigarette boat leaving its swizzle-stick wake on a blue-Curacao sea. Or a majestic view over what looks to be South America's Iguazu Falls seen from the throne of a helicopter.

As to the men's fashions, well, Foxx looks sharp in a shantung silk suit and shirt in cocoa and cognac tones. And Farrell looks tropicool in an array of retro Guayabera shirts. But aside from the earth-colored palette, there's not a New Look here.

I earnestly hope that Farrell's grungy, Wild West hair and caterpillar moustache do not catch on. They give this nice-looking fellow a debauched air that reeks of sex without being particularly sexy. Is there a word for a male skank?

He-'ho, anyone?

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.

Miami Vice ** (out of four stars)

Produced by Michael Mann and Pieter Jan Brugge, written and directed by Mann, based on the TV series created by Anthony Yerkovich, photography by Dion Beebe, music by Klaus Badelt, John Murphy and Organized Noise, distributed by Universal Pictures.

Running time: 2 hours, 26 mins.

Det. Sonny Crockett. . . Colin Farrell

Det. Ricardo Tubbs. . . Jamie Foxx

Isabella. . . Gong Li

Jose Yero. . . John Ortiz

Det. Gina Calabrese. . . Elizabeth Rodriguez

Det. Trudy Joplin..........Naomie Harris

Parent's guide: R (nudity, sex, drug trafficking, profanity, extreme violence)

Playing at: area theaters