The latest Hollywood blockbuster to hit the big screen is "Miami Vice" an update of the original 1980s TV series, and just as the Ferrari Testarossa was immortalised by the long-running programme, so the new cinema film sees a Maranello sportscar take centre stage, but this time it is the new F430 Spider. Detectives Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) drive a "grigio silverstone" finished version of Ferrari's latest convertible in the Michael Mann directed film which opened across US cinema screens last weekend.

The Ferrari Testarossa became a household name as a result of the adventures of Detective Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) who drove the white 1986 model car, along with his long-term screen sidekick Ricardo Tubbs. During the first two seasons of "Miami Vice" as well as the opening episodes of the third series the pair were actually behind the wheel of a "midnight black" Daytona Spider 365 GTS/4, although this was in fact a re-bodied Corvette, its exhaust note immediately differentiating it from Maranello's fine sounding engines. However this car was seen to be blown up by a shoulder-launched "stinger" missile during an episode that focused on an illegal arms deal.

This allowed it to be neatly replaced in the TV series by a Ferrari Testarossa, and the rest was history. Two examples of the Testarossa had been in fact donated by Ferrari North America who understood the unrivalled publicity that the very popular and fashionable programme offered to them. The cars which Ferrari NA delivered were actually black but were then painted white to allow for a better contrast a night. A black example of the Testarossa can be seen in the third episode of the third series ("Irish Eyes Are Crying") driven by an IRA shooter before the original Daytona 365 GTS/4 Spider was blown up later in the story. During the next episode ("Stone's War") the white Testarossa is introduced as Detective Crockett's new "wheels".

Miami Vice (Universal) 2006

For three decades, Michael Mann has remained one of 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.

In 2006, Mann returns to the seminal 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, ‘globalised’ millennium.”
 

Mann’s interest in telling the story of a dark world connected through “multi-commodity,” 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 globalised crime looks and feels like -- with a big-screen contemporisation 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.

Miami Vice begins as Crockett and Tubbs learn that a high-level leak has led to the slaughter of two federal agents and the murder of an informant friend’s family. Pulled into the case, the two detectives’ investigation takes them straight to the doorstep of vicious killers from the Aryan Brotherhood and a sophisticated network of globalised traffickers protected by world-class security. During the hunt, the partners encounter the cartel’s beautiful Chinese-Cuban financial officer Isabella (Gong Li, Memoirs of a Geisha) -- a woman who moves, launders and invests money. The seductress provides Crockett a way of exorcising his own demons as he tries to keep her safe from darker forces…while the new lovers learn just who’s playing (and falling for) whom. Simultaneously, the stoic Tubbs infiltrates the elusive criminal enterprise while keeping a protective eye on his intel-analyst girlfriend, Trudy (Naomie Harris, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest). As Crockett and Tubbs work undercover transporting drug loads into South Florida, they race to identify the group responsible for their friends’ killings while jointly investigating the New Underworld Order. During their mission, 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...

Supplementing the five-star cast, supporting players who join Mann in Miami Vice include Ciaran Hinds (Munich) as FBI Special Agent Fujima, Justin Theroux (Mulholland Dr.) as fellow vice cop Zito, Barry Shabaka Henley (Collateral) as Lieutenant Castillo, Elizabeth Rodriguez (Dead Presidents) as Detective Gina Calabrese, John Ortiz (Narc) as drug middleman José Yero and Luis Tosar (Cargo) as the stateless plutocrat (and Isabella’s pygmalion) Montoya.