Cool cars. Hot music. Chic people. Or maybe: Hot cars. Chic music. Cool people. Or is it: Chic cars. Cool music. Hot people.

Parsing the cool-hot-chicness of Miami Vice has always been part (or all) of its appeal, from the days of Don Johnson's rainbow-sherbet wardrobe up to this new, vacantly slick elaboration from writer-director Michael Mann. Mann executive-produced the groundbreaking '80s cop show, so he knows his way around slouchy hunks in Ray-Bans. The hunks have changed, and the shades are now made by Sama, but the essential qualifiers remain. Cool. Hot. Chic.

The cars are Bentley, Ferrari and fast. The music is Linkin Park and Moby. The people are Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, replacing Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as Miami-Dade cops/zeitgeist exemplars Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs. They're both yummily photographed in yummy clothing (mostly cream and black; no sherbet) over a soundtrack of yummy dance beats, and they both have the granitic-macho bearing of men doing important stuff with guns.

What kind of stuff? Well, the plot sends Crockett and Tubbs deep undercover as dope transporters, hoping to find a leak in a multi-agency investigation of a white-supremacist drug ring. Sonny and Rico meet the ring's main supplier, Jose (John Ortiz), who's actually just a middle-man for Jesus (Luis Tosar) — an unblinking South American overlord with a sophisticated global network. Jesus' right-hand babe, Isabella (Gong Li), swaps coolly assessing ogles with Sonny and eventually lures him to Havana for mojitos and passionless, artful sex.

Farrell and Li boast no chemistry to speak of, but neither do Farrell and Foxx, two charismatic leading men oppressed by excessive nightclub lighting and facial hair. Style trumps substance everywhere, but that's no surprise; Vice's main vice has always been its super-size guilty pleasures. The only surprise is how detached and perfunctory it all feels, as though everyone's going through the motions and no one's having any fun: It has the runway-model ennui of labored hipness.

Because we're in Mann's world — the gritty-suave milieu of Collateral and Heat — the violence is crackling and the gore well-staged. A few shockers are filmed obliquely: A highway suicide is summed up in a bloody smear, with succinct visual flare. Dion Beebe's (Memoirs of a Geisha) shaky-cam photography runs from hyperzoom facial close-ups (even during sex) to glam shots of thudding night clubs and sun-dappled Caribbean waters.

Sky and sea are streaked with sleek planes and muscular "go-fast boats" that signal Crockett and Tubb's dope-peddling panache. Sonny's windswept brow says more about his character, though I'm not sure what, than any of the screenplay's terse epigrammatic haikus ("Things go wrong, the odds / catch up, probability / is like gravity"). And unless I missed something huge, no one ever pinpoints the identity of the leak, just the agency behind it.

Such trifling details. As a purveyor of character, emotion or any other cinematic contraband, Miami Vice is a go-fast boat on a path to nowhere. But it sure does look cool getting there — cool, hot and chic. It might be an empty vessel, but it zooms.