“You cannot negotiate with gravity.”

Without any opening credits or establishing shots, Miami Vice just starts all at once, with Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s ‘Numb/Encore’ blasting from the speakers of a packed, pulsing, dimly lit nightclub where partners Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Rico Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) are about to apprehend a sex trafficker (Isaach De Bankolé). Amidst the swirl of lights and sounds, the duo are pulled off the impending arrest by a phone call from a distraught informant (John Hawkes) who we see swerving in and out of traffic as he frantically blathers to our leading men about a botched sting operation going down elsewhere between neo-Nazis and FBI agents.

Within a few minutes, the detectives have ditched the sex trafficking case and are hurtling down the highway (with helicopters providing spotlight coverage) to reign in their informant, who dives in front of an oncoming semi-truck a few seconds after Tubbs confirms that the man’s wife has been murdered. All of this happens in a dreamlike blur, with uncanny snippets of action emphasized, much left to the imagination, and the harsh digital photography enhancing the sense of lingering menace (smeared lights, abrasive pixelation). When the informant runs into traffic, we do not see the impact, only a split-second shot of a blood smear gradually widening beneath the tractor-trailer as it continues down the road.

The film carries on in this way, with twilight skies and noisy speedboat rides and inspired musical selections (Mogwai, Moby, Audioslave) taking the place of more conventional exposition, gradually unfolding a murky narrative in which the impulsive undercover cops try to assert themselves in a wicked game involving a politically-motivated FBI Special Agent (Ciarán Hinds), a reckless underboss (John Ortiz), and a ruthless kingpin (Luis Tosar).

That is the hand we have been dealt at 11:47 on Saturday night.

But the plot is of secondary importance for writer-director Michael Mann, who helped mastermind the 1980s television series upon which the film is based (and which today tends to be viewed as high camp). Or at least, the plot about cops and drugrunners is of secondary importance. For all of its lingo, tactical discussion, state-of-the-art gadgetry, and practical stunt work, Miami Vice is more or less dominated by so-called detours: a fervid romance between Sonny and Isabella (Gong Li), a cartel higher-up, and a more established relationship between Rico and Detective Trudy Joplin (Naomie Harris). There are times when it feels more like an crime-flavored romance than a crime drama, and it’s here that the film’s skittery rhythms bear the most fruit, when, for the moment at least, the pace slows down and the director indulges in fragmented swells of emotional turbulence that called to mind the work of Terrence Malick (The New World, Knight of Cups).

It’s too anxious to totally embrace its melodramatic elements, but it seems that the heart of its story lies in its wounded vulnerability rather than its criminal schemes. These are men who deeply yearn for a new life, but must settle for brief moments of reprieve and distraction before returning to the dissociated world to which they belong. Sonny in particular is a soul in crisis in the mold of classic Mann characters like James Caan in Thief or Will Graham in Manhunter; men whose strict adherence to their professional codes leave them with vast emotional voids. That we glean most of these sentiments from clipped dialogue, close-ups, and ruminative interludes involving landscape and piano is a credit to the filmmaker’s moxie, even if to some this abstraction causes the characters to scan as vacuous.

While these unusual priorities are detrimental to its ability to entertain as a pure genre film, taken on its own terms, it’s quite compelling as a unique, impressionistic mood piece that marries detail-oriented authenticity with stirring poetic romanticism while largely forgoing the middle ground between them and presenting it all in a clipped style that leads to distinct memories of its individual sequences but only a hazy grasp of its overall structure. Quite simply, there aren’t too many big-budget crime films that dare to deviate so far from the tried-and-true (and quite stale) blockbuster formula, and fewer that achieve something as captivating as Miami Vice.