"N ow what the hell are you waitin' for?" The decision to open Miami Vice with Jay-Z and Linkin Park's popular mash-up "Numb/Encore" is remarkably apt. In lyrics and pulse, the track sets up all the thrills and troubles to follow. Alternately nostalgic and avant-garde, corny and cocky, Miami Vice crams together mundane storylines and gorgeous images. In this, it is the exemplary Michael Mann action movie, supremely uninterested in action.

Even on its dark, angry surface, Miami Vice recalls its TV source material. Though it leaves out the pastels and Elvis the crocodile, Mann's script resurrects the team of Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Rico Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), so familiar with each another that they communicate in half sentences and glowers as well as the occasional overwritten splat of explanatory dialogue (again, true to the TV series' form).

The two detectives are introduced mid-assignment, in a hot nightclub where girls dance and slither. The partners take up their usual positions, Sonny scoping women and Rico glaring out at the bad behaviors occurring everywhere in front of him. They're looking for thugs who buy women and abuse them, but they're soon distracted from this case by another that more or less drops in their laps. A former associate (John Hawkes) calls in a panic, his current deal with the feds having gone extremely wrong. Though Sonny and Rico get onto the highway and even catch him within minutes, it's too late.

And with that, the movie turns into something else, abandoning the local vice plot and the barely sketched partnership (gleaned from the TV show: they ride in Crockett's Ferrari, they stare straight ahead) for an elaborate global smuggling network. FBI special agent Fujima (Ciaran Hinds) brings them in on a case involving a trailer-trashy Aryan Brotherhood crew (headed up by the entirely evil Tom Towles), connected to a larger venture run by Jose Yero (John Ortiz). Instantly disdainful of Fujima's "amateur" operation, which is apparently compromised from within, they're also eager to move in. Their boss, Lt. Castillo (Barry Shabaka Henley), tells Fujima what's what: "Your agency can't know anything about how they do what they do." Fine with everyone.

The new case is full of fast boats and gigantic guns that decimate limbs and heads rather than just shoot through them, and oh yes, it includes day trips to Paraguay and Colombia. Undercover as drug smugglers so good at what they do that they guarantee delivery ("Fast as FedEx," quips Tubbs), the boys soon find themselves in bed with the bad guys. Literally, in Sonny's case. While Rico is the stalwart sort, in a committed relationship with fellow detective Trudy (Naomie Harris, who barely has time to try out her Brooklyn accent before she's relegated to prop status), Sonny is predictably a player, all swagger and self-love.

Then he meets Isabella (Gong Li), a self-described "businesswoman" and money launderer for the man who turns out to be the Haiti-based kingpin, Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar). "I know what I'm doing," he hisses at Tubbs, who stands in for us, wondering if he does. Sonny asks her out; Isabella asks for a ride in his "very fast" boat to Havana, where she knows the "best place" for mojitos. They drink, they dance, they have sex, the camera so close on their faces and elbows and torsos they hardly seem whole bodies, but instead, ideas, gestures toward characters.

And so, even as the movie here seems most conventional (the illicit romance is almost perversely old-school), it is transformed into something else again. It's clear from the start that Miami Vice means to convert the usual action movie devices into occasions for smudgy, impressionistic visuals, chaotic close-ups and hand-held point-of-view shots with no clear subject. Gong Li, both completely out of place and mesmerizing, brings that project into (smudgy) focus.

She smiles, she scowls, she seduces. And she's vulnerable to Sonny's inexplicable charms, a seeming subplot that overtakes the Crockett-Tubbs story. Gong Li's face and form are made for this: She absorbs the movie's energies and just like that, it hardly matters what Crockett or Tubbs or Montoya thinks he's doing. This shift in focus is brief — the movie soon returns to its more regular business of shooting and exploding and moving drugs and bodies across borders — but it reshapes what's at stake. While Tubbs' supporting role may or may not have something to do with Foxx and Mann's reported conflicts on set, Crockett's "dilemma" concerning Isabella takes up too much time, so that Tubbs is left to worry, too typically, whether his buddy is in "too deep" — "There's undercover," he observes, "and then there's which way is up?"

Miami Vice takes up this question of perspective thematically, making the customary point that cops and robbers are similarly corrupt. But with Isabella, unmoored and unknowable, it finds another way to see.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

Miami Vice

Written and directed by Michael MannA Universal releaseOpens Friday at area theaters