Quote a bit of Stephen Hunter's paid drooling:
The rest of his review on Miami Vice is scathingly negative.Begin with Gong Li, as Isabella, a financial expert of Chinese Cuban background who, alas, works for the wrong people. This replicates a familiar story arc from the TV days. Crockett then, as Crockett now, was always falling for gals from the wrong side of the tracks, and almost saving them with the purity of his heart and love. And if ever a woman deserved saving it's the tough, beautiful Isabella. Gong has a reedy little voice that at first seems wrong for her elegant beauty, but then wins you over, like Jean Arthur's cackle.
Next up: Naomie Harris as the Det. Trudy Joplin character played by Olivia Brown all those years ago. Harris's Joplin, now emotionally involved with Tubbs simply to supply some arbitrary emotion to the equation, is really tough. She has a good scene in which she uses her in-your-face patois on a reluctant snitch and turns him around on the dime. She'd turn anybody around on a dime. Later, she's the central victim in the movie's best sequence, when she's kidnapped and the squad must pull off a SWAT raid to save her and put her kidnappers on the ground.
Finally, TV viewers will remember the elegant beauty Saundra Santiago as Det. Gina Calabrese, Sonny's longtime occasional love interest. Gina has been re-Calabreseed, this time as another toughie, but one who's as much a SWAT stud as the guys. Played by a young woman named Elizabeth Rodriguez who looks as if she sprinkles cartridges on her cereal instead of sugar, Gina takes command during the raid to free Trudy, and has the movie's best line when she advises a kidnapper holding a detonator and threatening to blow everybody up: "On the other hand, I can put a 55-grain slug at 2,700 feet per second into your medulla oblongata and your brain will be so dead it won't be able tell your finger to push the button." I love it when they talk like that!