Run For Your Lives! The Blockbusters Are Coming!

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Starring: Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx. Release date: July 28. How long the show ran: 1984-89

THE CHALLENGE Updating the ultimate '80s cop show

WHAT'S NEW Miami, for starters. Style-conscious director Michael Mann, who executive-produced Vice for TV, took the original show's atmospherics from a provincial Miami that hid its grit under pink stucco. Now it's a boomtown, flush with international cash and bristling with glassy towers. The crime scene in '80s Miami, Mann says, "was just small-town cocaine cowboys. Now, everything seems to have a couple of zeroes added to the end of it." Gone too are the signature pastels. As for the substance, the director insisted on an R rating, allowing the movie to show the sex and violence the TV show had to imply.

THE BUZZ Production, on location in Florida and the Caribbean, was rougher than Don Johnson's stubble. Hurricanes closed the set three times, as did an incident in the Dominican Republic involving an off-duty cop who wanted to get on-set and a spot of gunfire; in December, Farrell had to be treated for exhaustion and dependency on prescription medication. Mann, a notoriously meticulous director, has pulled off tough, big-star productions before (Heat, Ali). But movie audiences have tended to like their TV remakes campy (Charlie's Angels, Mr. & Mrs. Smith), and Mann takes Vice, the movie, dead seriously. "I hope the movie will surprise people familiar with the show," Mann says. "I was never interested in doing something derivative." —By James Poniewozik