As Hollywood continues to plunder popular television shows for a quick remake, and an even quicker return, it was inevitable that ‘80’s seminal cop show Miami Vice would get its turn. Less inevitable was the method. Those expecting a pastel-tinged rerun of fashionable excess dressed up as policing were right to be nervous. In an uneasy alliance, maverick director Michael Mann (Ali, The Insider) was to steer more conventional casting choices in Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx as Miami’s beloved vice buck-stoppers, Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs. It is here the comparison stops.

Miami Vice bears as much resemblance to the original as a Walkman does an MP3 player. They might share the same name, but that is about it. For a start, these renegade cops spend most of their time outside Miami. A South American cartel is planning a drop, Sonny and Rico go undercover. It’s complicated when Sonny unexpectedly, and unrealistically, falls in love. There are lots of guns and planes and bloodshed. There is a lot of graphic, stomach churning violence.

The film slips straight into nightclub action - there are no opening credits – where it’s tense and gritty. Sweaty. The feeling quickly dissolves as, in many ways, this Miami Vice feels like day-time soap cloaked as a thriller. Unrewarding angles and positions are emphasised by Mann’s love of digital video, the kind that gave Collateral a suitable hot, greasy light. Here it feels contrived and compounds the distance generated by cold performances and the character’s mumbled, clichéd shorthand. These people don’t converse, they barely even talk. A muddied, often implausible narrative is even more alienating.

Miami Vice is in sharp contrast to its super-slick TV counterpart, despite closing like the hi-concept ‘80’s thriller it is meant to be. Confused and embattled, you’re left wondering where the frivolous hand of a Bruckheimer or Scott has gone when you need it most.

// COLIN FRASER