REEL CRITICS:

Michael Mann has made his mark as a writer and director of major Hollywood films for many years. “Collateral,” “The Insider” and “The Last of the Mohicans” are just a few of his efforts that earned Oscar nominations. He helped create the original “Miami Vice” TV series that brought style, color and grit to the small screen. He would be the logical choice to take his own TV show to the next level as a big budget movie.

Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell reprise the hip cop roles played by Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas on TV. They are believable as down and dirty undercover narcs. But they have none of the humor or sly commentary that made the original appealing to a wide audience. The movie version tracks their descent into the ugly drug trade where every deal goes wrong and people’s brains are blown out for sport.

Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic” won accolades because it dealt seriously with complex aspects of the same drug trade. But “Miami Vice” is the MTV version of this story. It has lots of style and attitude but there’s absolutely no substance or meaning to this mindless story of gangsters gone wild.

The writer and director of “The Sixth Sense” has come up with another unusual movie in “The Lady in the Water.” But he’s trying too hard to give us a story that packs the same emotional wallop and “a-ha” moment as his first hit.

How best to describe “Lady in the Water”? It combines elements of “E.T.”, “The “Da Vinci Code” and even a little “Harry Potter” in its far-fetched plot.

Credit Paul Giamatti, in another heartfelt performance, for making us at all want to believe any of this nonsense. Well, maybe not the part where he’s underwater for about six minutes. But perhaps he’s been working with a trainer.

Giamatti is Cleveland Heep, a schlubby janitor who patiently serves the eclectic tenants of an unusual apartment building. Someone has been using the pool after hours and clogging the drains, and it’s not long before we find out who it is — it’s a waif named Story, played by Bryce Dallas Howard. She tells him she is a Narf who’s been sent here from the Blue World to inspire a human. As soon as she figures out who it is, she will then be able to go home.

Amazingly, Cleveland buys into Story’s story pretty quickly. Perhaps it’s because she looks so helpless, or maybe he just doesn’t get a naked girl in his room very often. Or perhaps it’s the evil Scrunt lurking in the grass that convinces him.

In any case, he does his best to help her and gets other tenants involved with little or no questions asked. Imagine a knock on your door and someone saying, “Hey, I’ve got this Narf in my shower — wanna come over and help her out?”

You bet.

The lady in question fails to stir any real empathy over her predicament. Howard is good at shivering; but her personality is as colorless as her complexion. There are welcome moments of comedic relief from the supporting cast — especially Freddy Rodriguez as a lopsided weightlifter, and Bob Balaban as a prickly movie critic.

In the height of conceit, Shyamalan has cast himself in a pivotal role, but he is also very bland as a potential savior of the free world. Don’t quit your day job, man.

Target: ‘John Tucker’ and teenage audiencesHe is a cunningly sly individual who prides himself on his mastery of the opposite sex. He is so clever in his dating methods that he takes out girls from three different cliques so they will never be aware of his debauchery. He is the object of every girl’s affection. He is the face of high school athletics. He is what most people refer to as the perfect guy.

He is also the focal point of a plot designed principally to give him an idea of what it feels like to be used. He is John Tucker.

“John Tucker Must Die” centers on three girls’ devilish and revengeful desires to give John Tucker a taste of his own medicine by making him fall in love with a completely objective third party, and then ripping it out from under him.

Kate, a new girl who sees each of the three girls on a date with Tucker at the same restaurant where she works (all in the same night), is immediately dubbed the most, or rather, only, available candidate to feign romance. With the expertise of three John Tucker-experienced girls, how could they fail?

The majority of the film caters to the bringing down of Tucker by exposing his more feminine side, with help from estrogen pills and women’s underwear. The true humor, however, becomes blatantly clear in the girls’ attempts to make John fall in love with Kate. When four females collaborate on a plan so devious against an unknowing and arguably defenseless male, the odds rest heavily in favor of the women.

And sympathy is absent. Because this is John Tucker we’re dealing with. His humiliation is genuine, though, and this is why we forgive him in the end.

John Tucker Must Die is enjoyable purely for its teen humor and catering to one target audience. A chick flick in every sense of the phrase, its laughs stem from high school ironies and stereotypical teen life.

2nd Woody Allen foray to London falls shortEmboldened by his success with last year’s terrific “Match Point,” Woody Allen has again picked Scarlett Johansson and London as his leading ladies in “Scoop.” It’s a lightweight farce that doesn’t compare to his best work, but fans may still get a chuckle or two.

Johansson is Sondra Pransky, a naive Brooklyn girl who’s recently switched her studies from dental hygiene to journalism and is visiting friends in London.

She attends a music hall show and is invited onstage by Splendini, a Borscht-belt magician (Allen). While being de-materialized she encounters the spirit of recently deceased Joe Strombel (Ian McShane). A legendary journalist, Joe got the scoop of a lifetime but alas, he’s no longer alive.

So he shares his tip with Sondra that the suave aristocrat Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman) may be a modern day Jack the Ripper.

Sondra’s not the brightest bulb but manages to get Splendini (a.k.a. Sid Waterman) to play one of the Hardy Boys to her Nancy Drew.

Ater a painfully clumsy first encounter, Peter is totally gaga over her and the feeling is mutual. She compliments him on his nice teeth, and he shows them, pearly white. Surely such a charming, handsome man couldn’t be a murderer?

“Scoop” owes its story to classic “The Thin Man” and Hitchcock films. Johansson, Jackman and McShane gamely make a go of their one-dimensional characters, but Allen’s shtick is now officially tired.

Plot, believability don’t hold in ‘Water’Fairy tales can come true, at least if you’re M. Night Shyamalan.