In theaters

“Miami Vice”

Written and directed by Michael Mann, 133 minutes, rated R.

The first sign that the new Michael Mann movie, “Miami Vice,” is going to remove itself from Mann’s own popular, 1980s television show, is the moment Colin Farrell slides onscreen sporting a blowout mullet and a blunted Fu Manchu.

Whereas the television show became a harbinger for the horrorible fashion of the day – it championed such things as the skinny neck tie, the geri curl, the white shoe and the pastel suit – there is nothing in Farrell’s tangled bird’s nest of a ‘do that suggests that mousse, let alone shampoo, has been applied in days.

This rough-and-tumble version of “Vice,” which Mann based on his own script, never finds a story that competes with Miami itself. At night or at sunset, on the water or along the city’s neon corridors, Mann’s Miami looks at once hot and cool, dangerous and seductive – just as it should be. Those same qualities should apply to the story, and while they occasionally do, it’s only when the characters connect, which they do in just one relationship – and not the one you expect.

Vice cops Sonny Crockett (Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx, barely registering) are so detached, some will wonder whether they even were introduced before filming began. Instead, the relationship between Crockett and the mysterious Isabella (the terrific Gong Li) gives the movie the soul it otherwise would lack.

The story that draws them together is a convoluted pastiche of drug cartel cliches we’ve seen time and again in better movies and television shows. Crockett and Tubbs investigate a South American drug kingpin shipping drugs into Miami. They go undercover into this peculiar world of oily toughs. Eventually, Crockett meets Isabella, a gorgeous money launderer who works for the drug kingpin and is in a shaky relationship with him. What she finds in Crockett is pure heat. So, naturally, fireworks and bullets ensue.

What’s peculiar is how the movie refuses to fetishize the Ferrari Crocket and Tubbs drive, the expensive speedboats they race, the swank locales they visit, the bling that’s part of their job. That was a core element of the television show, the reason so many watched, but here, it’s as if the subculture doesn’t exist though it continues to thrive.

More pressing is the reason the movie exists. If Mann was determined to ditch the kitsch of his television show and make a serious film, the natural conclusion is that he did so to offer new insights into the current drug culture. So what is it?

Turns out it isn’t much. While the movie does feature a fine shootout here, a swell romance there, and lives are repeatedly put on the line throughout “Miami Vice,” there’s the sense that Mann became bored with the ideas that propelled his television show onto the screen, and thus his film into theaters. After seeing it, you might see why.

Grade: C

On video and DVD

“V for Vendetta”

Directed by James McTeigue, written by the Wachowski brothers, 130 minutes, rated R.

The cautionary thriller “V for Vendetta,” finds director James McTeigue envisioning difficult times for the year 2020. England will be a totalitarian state ruled by the vicious dictator, Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt), the United States will be ruined by the global war it ignited, and on the streets of London a mass murderer in a Guy Fawkes mask goes by the name V.

Played with swift, literate ease by Hugo Weaving of “The Matrix” movies, V has a deadly vendetta against Sutler and his regime. Like Fawkes himself, who died by hanging in 1605 for planning to blow up Parliament, V plans to do the job himself to capture the world’s attention, as destroying famous buildings tends to do.

The core of this pop-culture confection dips liberally into a scattershot of influences to compose its whole. Noir factors into almost every corner of the story and its production, but so do elements of science fiction and the Western. Adding to the fright factor is that V physically looks and moves as if he’s one step removed from Michael Jackson, though after surgical tweaking that went awry. In some shots, their resemblance is uncanny – and a little creepy.

This overly wordy movie romanticizes a terrorist and turns him into a hero. The terrorist in question is fighting a fascist government that has done unspeakable things to its citizens – homosexuals and women are loathed and murdered, creative thought is crushed, art is abolished, freedom is lost. People live in a pacifistic state of fear that prevents them from rising up against Sutler and his henchmen.

Complicating matters is Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), the fearsome naif who V saves one night from certain rape by government cops and then converts (rather brutally) into his fearless sympathizer, and Stephen Rea as Finch, the chief inspector charged with finding V and shutting him down. In this dense, beautifully shot movie of so many ideas, each is excellent.

Grade: B+

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews. He may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.