A new “Miami Vice” film written and directed by Michael Mann is in the works, starring Colin Farrell as Sonny Crockett and Jamie Foxx as Ricardo Tubbs. Allegedly, the story involves the Crockett and Tubbs characters battling a transnational Chinese-Cuban drugs-arms syndicate run by a villainess played by Gong Li. The character of Gina Calabrese is played by British actress Naomie Harris.

Fans of the TV series must surely be screaming in agony.

Colin Farrell cannot be Sonny Crockett. Colin Farrell is Colin Farrell. Only Don Johnson can be Sonny Crockett, just as only Sean Connery can be James Bond, only William Shatner can be Captain Kirk, and only Clint Eastwood can be Dirty Harry. Only Philip Michael Thomas can be Rico Tubbs. Only the original cast of “Miami Vice” can ever play the “Vice” characters. Jamie Foxx (who is pushing hard to be the next J-Lo -- so ubiquitous and bling-hungry that he is no longer tolerable) can never be Tubbs. It’s also nauseating to hear that the Gina Calabrese character (the partner/sometime girlfriend of Crockett in the TV series played by Saundra Santiago) becomes Tubbs’ girlfriend in the film. That’s incest, as well as sacrilege.

But, these smaller unacceptables aside, that is not the worst of it. By reducing “Vice” to a just another lightweight summer action flick, Michael Mann, the producer of the original series, and one of its original writers, has not only wasted a gigantic opportunity, he has done a grave disservice to the spirit of “Miami Vice,” and what made “Miami Vice” truly great. What made “Vice” great, largely came after Mann himself had little or less to do with the series, after its first season.

I am not talking about the superficial aspects that everyone talks about, such as the style, the pastels, the music, etc. I am talking about the groundbreaking political narrative that the best “Vice” episodes channeled, in unprecedented fashion, through a national prime time television series.

The dark and cynical “Miami Vice” blew open Reagan-Bush/Iran-Contra era America, and carved open the hypocrisy of the “war on drugs.” The show dared expose US government corruption, the CIA, covert operations, CIA involvement in narco-trafficking, and US imperialism. It dared show how rank and file cops, drug agents and whistleblowers who tried to do their jobs in earnest were manipulated, obstructed and betrayed by their own government. What viewers got on “Vice” was actually happening, in some form, in the world.

Consider these great “Vice” episodes. In “Prodigal Son,” Crockett and Tubbs pursue Colombian drug lords to New York, where they are double-crossed by US covert operatives who inexplicably protect the Colombians, and then discover that the entire operation is run out of a US government-connected multinational bank I can think of no more accurate or bitter denunciation of the New World Order ever seen on modern television.

In “Back in the World,” Crockett and a loose cannon investigative reporter from his Vietnam days revisited the heroin crimes of that time (including the smuggling of drugs in the bodies of dead US soldiers), only to find that a major Air America narco-trafficking US spook (played, in a brilliant casting coup, by G. Gordon Liddy) is back in action again, trafficking cocaine from Latin America into Miami. This episode essentially was a foot sailing into the collective Reagan-Bush crotch, as was a sequel, “Stone’s War,” which nailed the US and the CIA for covert operations in Nicaragua.

Remarkably, “Stone’s War” aired (if memory serves) in the same week in 1986 that the CIA aircraft piloted by Eugene Hasenfus was shot down over Nicaragua, which ushered in the public portion of the Iran-Contra scandal, and the beginning of the end of the Reagan regime.

The “Miami Vice” series finale in 1989, “Freefall,” was loosely based on the Manuel Noriega case. Crockett and Tubbs are recruited by the CIA to bring a Latin American dictator to the US to stand trial, only to be double-crossed by the CIA, who smuggle the dictator (an ally of the White House) to safety. Crockett and Tubbs shoot the CIA plane carrying the dictator out of the sky, and, in total disgust, turn in their badges forever.

That fitting end to the series, that final “screw you”m, was where “Miami Vice” deserved to have remained, never to be disturbed again.

Today, with an even more horrendous Bush era underway, and with virtually all the worst Iran-Contra political players back in power, and the bogus “war on drugs” still going strong in Latin America (and Central Asia), the only good reason to bring back “Miami Vice” would be another round of “public service,” the way the original TV series did. The only “Vice” that would make sense would be a reunion of the original cast, now in middle age, to tackle this Bush regime’s back-again monsters.

Tragically, it won’t happen.

Michael Mann is displaying zero sensitivity to current events and political realities, by mangling the characters, giving us Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, and a racist political construct out of the McCarthy era: a worldwide Chinese-Cuban crime syndicate, masterminded by, of all things, a hot Chinese temptress (Gong Li).