MIAMI VICE Hits Theaters

For almost 30 years director Michael Mann has reined as one the most compelling filmmakers, and his consistent level of artistry has created an indelible influence on cinema. His stylish, lasting dramas from Manhunter and Heat to The Insider and Collateral examine the complicated dynamic -- and sometimes indefinite margin -- between criminals and those struggling to keep one step ahead of them, even at the cost of their own psyches.This Friday Michael Mann premieres the feature film based on the 1980’s hit franchise on which he first gained his reputation in television: Miami Vice.

According to writer F.X. Feeney, in his book Michael Mann (Taschen, 2006), "After Collateral, Mann lost no time choosing Miami Vice as his next project. What attracted him to the original teleplay in 1984 -- the reality of life undercover -- he finds no less compelling in our new, 'globalized' millennium." Mann's interest in telling the story of a dark world connected through "multicommodity," continues Feeney, lies in the fact that "drugs, weapons, pirated software, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, even human beings are all routinely trafficked and sold, across international boundaries."In the mid-'80s, the television series Miami Vice, with a brilliant pilot screenplay written by the show's creator Anthony Yerkovich, arrived and created a tectonic revolution in television. Drawing its creative inspiration from Mann's work, Miami Vice became one of the most groundbreaking series in television history, pioneering a new way in which televised dramas were conceived and staged. As Film Comment critic Richard T. Jameson remarked at the time, "It's hard to forbear saying, every five minutes or so, 'I can't believe this was shot for television!'"

Now, the filmmaker comes back to his "new Casablanca," Miami, where third world drug running intersects with the billion-dollar corporate-industrial complex -- for the first postmillennial examination of what globalized crime looks and feels like -- with a big-screen contemporization of Miami Vice, one unrestricted by the limitations of television.

The roles he helped to create of Miami vice cops "Sonny" Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs are inhabited by COLIN FARRELL and Academy Award winner JAMIE FOXX, who both underwent extensive training and simulations by undercover officers from the DEA, FBI, ATF, Miami-Dade Police Department (including S.W.A.T.) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) -- people who themselves tread the dangerous world of international trafficking.Crockett and Tubbs work undercover transporting drug loads into South Florida. During the film the lines will get crossed as the partners start forgetting not only which way is up, but on which side of the law they're supposed to be........