The wildest card in the deck is back.

Warner Brothers has finally released the first official picture of Heath Ledger in makeup, dressed as Batman's arch-villain, The Joker.

The Dark Knight, a sequel to Batman Begins, will reunite director Christopher Nolan and Batman star Christian Bale, and is said to be based on Frank Miller's novel, The Dark Knight Returns. The first film ended on Batman stumbling upon The Joker's calling card, setting up the sequel.

Ledger, best known for his stellar work in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, has some big boots to fill. Jack Nicholson's portrayal of The Joker in Tim Burton's Batman continues to be widely regarded as the best acting job in any comic-book film.

With a flap of pink-flamingo wings, a whoosh of speedboats in the bay, and the rear-swinging amble of burnished girls in bikinis, the TV series “Miami Vice” launched itself week after week as a thoroughly sleazy delight. The show, which played on NBC from 1984 to 1989, was an enormous pop-culture event—the media poetry of the cocaine era. Raspy-voiced Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, of the leopard eyes, were the stars—two cocky but not very talented male beauties who spoke in innuendos and dressed in pink T-shirts, Armani (white or gray), and sockless loafers. Anthony Yerkovich created the series, but Michael Mann, as executive producer, brooded over it like the Holy Ghost, bringing together and harmonizing the latest fashions in music, clothing, and design. Languorous and overripe, “Miami Vice” was the essence of commercial hip (if one can speak of such a thing); the best episodes were shot and cut like movies and glowed with neon and pastels and party lights in stucco mansions. The ostensible subject of the series was Miami-Dade County police work; the real subject was the varieties of pleasure under an endless American sun.

In the new movie based on the series, Michael Mann, the writer and director this time, hasn’t hidden the sun, exactly, but the general tone of the material is darker, danker, dirtier, and much more violent. “Miami Vice” was fairly bloody for eighties TV, but here the blood hits the wall with a splat. This “Miami Vice” is a grim genre exercise—fascinating, certainly, and impressive at times, but only intermittently enjoyable. Colin Farrell is now Detective Sonny Crockett, and Jamie Foxx is Detective Ricardo Tubbs. These are serious fellows. Some of the time, they actually dress like cops, and they sternly refuse to engage in lounge-lizard repartee—they hardly engage at all. Foxx is fine, in a frowning, heavy-browed way, and he keeps staring at Farrell as if he wanted more out of him and were having trouble getting it. We share his frustration. Farrell is dour and anxious, and the mustache and stubble he wears is not only unflattering; it hides what we want to discover in his face. In this movie, as in the recent “Ask the Dust,” Farrell’s performance is vague and uncentered. The two partners are spiritually alone, which is a sombre but unnecessary lesson for us.

In general, it’s a hard movie to read. The over-all shape of the story is clear enough, but the details, which might provide a satisfying sense of participation, are often elusive. Mann’s material is an enlarged and much more complicated version of a plot familiar from the TV series: Crockett and Tubbs insinuate themselves into a drug-smuggling operation and try to smash it. Pretending to be heavy-wallet transporters, they travel to Haiti and Colombia, where they impress various subordinates with their bona fides as criminals. Then they meet the Colombian kingpin (Luis Tosar), a solemn gent with a Biblical beard, an expensive shirt, a magnificent house, and exquisitely phrased threats. We can relax and enjoy these early interviews, with their nasty jostling back and forth, because we know the boys will pass muster—if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be much of a movie. Once Crockett and Tubbs are in, “Miami Vice” devotes itself to betrayal, the constant of all drug-world pictures. Mann’s narrative style in this movie is terse, abrupt, and fragmentary, his dialogue little more than advanced drug-dealer-and-cop jargon, verbal hardtack spat out of the corner of someone’s mouth, some of it by Latino and Chinese actors with accents thick enough to make you long for the bad old days when Americans played most of the foreigners in Hollywood films and delivered their lines in accents that any Missourian could understand. “Miami Vice” risks, and often achieves, a kind of clenched impenetrability. The movie must have six variants of an ugly ruffian speaking into a cell phone words like these: �