For those who’ve happened across that Roger Friedman item that passes along bad reports about Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (Universal, 7.28), I have two responses. One, Mann is absolutely incapable — strategically, emotionally, psychologically, physiologically, technologically — of making a bad film. Even if Vice turns out to be one of his lesser efforts, by Mann’s Olympian standards that will still make it an exceptional ride. And two, keep in mind what F.X. Feeney, who’s seen a cut of the film, had to say last week. The film, Feeney claims, “draws on wellsprings of romantic passion that haven’t surfaced this vividly in Mann’s films since Last of the Mohicans. Two kinds of passion are represented — you have a stable relationship between Jamie Foxx (as Tubbs) and Naomie Harris as the fellow undercover cop, who are trying to make love work in the dangerous arena of undercover work, and then you have Colin Farrell as Sonny Crockett pursuing a dangerous liason with Gong Li, the wife of a stateless plutocrat who rules in the triborderarea.” The films is about “the psychological cost of working undercover, of leading a life in a mask for months on end, of behaving in terms of ‘impulse without inhibition.’ So Crockett must answer to a spontaneous passion while Tubbs must secure a more traditional, if endangered, one. This balances the Tubbs/Crockett partnership in fresh, unpredictable ways I don’t recall from the series.”