For Crockett and Tubbs, only life undercover will set them freekeyword

The name is the same; everything else is changed.

Miami Vice is not an echo of the pastel-hued 1980s cop show. It's a distinctly darker vision, another of the striking, atmospheric crime dramas that have been the hallmark of writer-producer-director Michael Mann's career. His latest is a hard-edged thriller that carefully avoids resurrecting the pink T-shirted ghosts of Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas. With its gritty, disquieting video imagery and high-tech hardware, it's like a Bond film spliced with Cops.

The plot is not overtaxing -— it's about guns, drugs and money — because the real focus is the allure, danger and alienation of hiding behind an assumed identity.

Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx star as the undercover narcotics team Crockett and Tubbs. Their bond is a matter of professional loyalty, respect but not personal friendship. These are solitary, terse men whose lives are defined by their jobs. Their way of telling a colleague that they care is by standing vigil at the hospital bed, not rambling on about it. Part of the appeal of going undercover, it seems, is the chance to cast off their inhibitions, take life-or-death risks, and run off at the mouth.

In the course of impersonating drug runners to infiltrate a South American kingpin's operation, Crockett is drawn into a relationship with the mobster's hot financial adviser played by Gong Li (鞏俐). His unexpected empathy for her bewilders him, and between back-scrubbing sessions in the shower he begins to feel conflicted about luring her into a plot that could leave her dead or serving a life sentence. Tubbs finds himself in a parallel situation when a seedy tribe of white supremacist meth dealers captures his cop girlfriend (Naomi Harris) and he must lead the perilous raid to free her. Neither conflict ends happily. In Mann's macho world, sex is a stew of pleasure, menace and regret. The male group ethic of dangerous work expertly done is the only reliable source of satisfaction for his heroes.

In Heat, Thief and Collateral, Mann set a high standard for inventive pacing, framing and movement, especially when staging gun battles. He equals his best work here with two nighttime firefights as well orchestrated as they are ferocious. Mann's cameras move through the barrage as if they were capturing battlefield footage in real time. At one point he puts us so deep into the guts of the demolition derby that the camera lens catches some red splatters. It might seem like an accident, until you remember Tubbs a few scenes earlier invoking Jackson Pollack as he threatens to blast a crime boss all over his wallpaper.

Mann doesn't deal in accidents. He's a perfectionist whose work demands, and rewards, close attention. His sequences are long, elegant, and tricky. But he doesn't waste shots. He tells us the least we must know to make sense of a situation, then insists we work out the rest for ourselves. I was halfway into the film before realizing that a bald bulldog of a man misbehaving in the opening dance club sequence was a member of the Miami-Dade police force; what seemed like an offhand moment was a deftly timed slow-release joke. Mann's meticulously detailed film is full of little Easter eggs like that, and you blink at peril of missing them. Without comment he shows us a population that turned its back on the stark natural beauty of costal Florida while creating stark, soulless multimillion US dollar condos for drug barons and menacing slums for their customers. Mann creates a jagged junkyard environment in which violence is as inevitable as the lightning we see striking time and again from the humid tropical skies.