Those walking into Michael Mann’s theatrical updating of his classic ’80’s television favorite “Miami Vice” expecting a glossy, action-packed nostalgia trip have another thing coming. This latest opus from the director of “Collateral” and “Heat” is an immediate dropkick to the ass, an energetic, gritty and brutally observational foray into the world of undercover cops and the multinational South Florida narcotics trade. While not quite the masterpiece of other Mann epics, this one’s still pretty darn sensational, the filmmaker crafting a crackerjack melodrama that gives the summer movie season a much-needed shot in the arm.

The film forgoes opening credits and shoots itself straight out of a cannon diving audiences straight into a world they’ve never seen. With breathless immediacy we learn that Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) are undercover Miami detectives, that one of their former informants (a fidgety John Hawkes) has rolled on the FBI due to his wife’s kidnapping and that shady drug dealer José Yero (John Ortiz) may be pulling the strings behind a very large curtain. Getting the go-ahead from their wily lieutenant (a fabulous Barry Shabaka Henley), the duo go undercover inside the world of international drug trafficking hoping to takedown the team responsible for so much Miami carnage.

What they discover is more complex and more far reaching then anything they ever imagined. José’s being controlled by a seemingly omnipotent plutocrat named Montoya (Luis Tosar), his Asian wife Isabella (Gong Li) running things with an icy efficiency that belies her lithe, sexy frame. Crockett and Tubbs begin their work transporting drug loads into South Florida, but in their zealous pursuit of justice lines start getting crossed, sex becomes more than a weapon and the cops find themselves so deep inside Montoya’s organization getting out isn’t just difficult, it’d deadly.

That’s really it for plot, Mann taking series creator Anthony Yerkovich’s characters and turning them into driven dynamos of deception, action and violence where truth only matters when you’re standing on the right side of the dividing line. Where that line is, however, is anyone’s guess, the detectives trying to navigate it easily lost within its abyssal trenches doing the dirty jobs no one really wants to know about. Fast cars, sexy women, big guns, lots of money, oodles of power; all are present and all are intoxicating, and the omnipresent danger of self destruction hovers over the job just as prevalently as the weapons of the targets aimed square for the cops’ eyeballs.

Does it all work? Hell yes, only just not as magnificently and in such rich detail as it did in say “Manhunter” or “Heat.” I couldn’t help but get the feeling Mann was under intense pressure by Universal to bring his opus to a length just a wee bit over two hours. This movie screams of needing an extra hour to bring it more depth, more nuance, more character, the two main men furiously driving it homes just as mysterious enigmas by the end as the are during that furtive first glimpse in a darkened Miami dance club.

On the flip side, however, this distance keeping us from getting to know Crockett and Tubbs down to their nitty-gritty is insanely helpful in making an audience understand the disassociating duplicity it must take to become a successful undercover operative. These are men treading waters so dangerous one slip of an eyebrow is enough to fill your body full of lead, the slightest misstep a one way trip to a bottomless locker planted so deep under the sea Davey Jones himself wouldn’t be able to find it. Mann knows and understands this, “Miami Vice” obtaining an authenticity so palpable you almost feel the movie’s sweat cascading down your very own thigh.

It helps that this is one of the sexiest and flat-out breathtaking adventures you’re likely to see all year. Even at his worst, Mann makes motion pictures that move, feel and look like no other. From Colin Farrell’s magnificent body, to Gong Li’s seductive lips, to Jamie Foxx’s smoldering glare, all of it comes alive behind the lens of Dion Beebe’s stunning digital camerawork. Watching this film is like being a fly on a very large wall, Mann and Beebe staging the proceedings at just the right distance as to give the audience distance and perspective. At the same time, the duo still manage to immerse them straight into the action, so much so the heart palpitations coursing through the protagonists’ frames become so infectious theirs start furiously beating right along with them.

Rumors of complications aside, Farrell and Foxx make the most of their characters under incredibly daunting conditions. These are not men we’re meant to know, at least not in the film as presented to us here, and yet when both reach a point of need or want in their lives the actors manage to convey these moments so stirringly it is impossible not to be moved.

But the real standout here is Li, inhabiting her third major character in a Hollywood production (after the forgettable double-whammy of “Chinese Box” and “Memoirs of a Geisha”) and turning it into something magnificent. There is real want in her eyes, real need driving her to the decisions bringing her to that almost undecipherable dividing line. This is as varied and multifaceted performance as any I’ve seen all year, and if any actor is more deserving (overdue might be more like it) in 2006 of an Oscar nomination than Li please forgive me because for at this moment I cannot think of them.

Will it play for general audiences? I can’t really presume to know. It’s long, Mann taking his time before unleashing furious bits of trademark ultraviolence in the feature’s spectacular final act. Even then the staging of these scenes are so dynamically different, the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire an almost ghost-like haze of mysterious popping coming from so many differing directions it felt like they were surrounding me. The last bits also felt a bit off, a fateful decision by one of the detectives almost too sudden to pull the emotional heft the director so longs for it to achieve.

Still, the film is a corker. Like most Mann beverages, this one is a cocktail of nitroglycerin just waiting to be uncorked by a theatrical audience aching for something different. It is as charged and electric as movies get, a sublime foray into the dark side of law enforcement television in the ‘80’s never had the guts to descend. More than a remake, far more than an update, Mann’s “Miami Vice” is an adventurous marvel that makes other summer Hollywood action movies look like child’s play. Put simply, this one rocks.