MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Miami Blues’: Magenta Mayhem : Movies: Director George Armitage’s amoral, anything-for-a-jolt film is bathed in high-gloss technique.

The Miami of “Miami Blues” is an overheated griddle of shifty, sun-drenched psychopaths and hangdog lawmen. It’s the modern equivalent of the Wild West--a wide open world of outlaws done up in bright pop colorations of flamingo pink and lime green.

Into this world enters Junior (Alec Baldwin), fresh out of prison from California and ravenously eager to score. He has an avidity for violence; right off the plane, in Miami Airport, he snaps in two the finger of an offending Hare Krishna. Fortified with a batch of stolen credit cards, he checks into a fancy hotel, orders up a hooker (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and sets about his specialty: spotting robberies and then robbing the crooks. (Junior has a built-in radar for the illicit.)

When he beats senseless the cop on his case, Hoke Moseley (Fred Ward), he pockets the sergeant’s badge. Posing as the law, Junior zips around town reveling in his new-found cover. His badge is the perfect criminal’s camouflage.

At its best, “Miami Blues” (citywide) is a deliriously pulpy joyride. George Armitage, the 47-year-old writer-director, is a veteran of the Roger Corman Z-movie mill. He has the confidence of an action filmmaker whose aptitude for the choreography of violence is on par with a good movie musical director’s flair for the choreography of romance. They share a similar feeling for movement and flourish.

What makes “Miami Blues” unsettling, in spite of itself, is the sense that the garish ultra-violence we’re witnessing is just a species of high jinks. Armitage, adapting Charles Willeford’s smart, nasty 1984 novel, doesn’t provide the kind of moral dimension that might make Junior’s sprees cumulatively frightening. The film careens along as a blithely funky shoot-’em-up. It might have been made by a sociopathic Chuck Jones.

There’s a mite of method in Armitage’s mindlessness. The film’s sudden shifts back and forth from lickety-split violence to slapstick have a goofy horror that seems peculiarly modern. The mixture of disparate tones in “Miami Blues” (rated R) has a wacky contemporary edge. But the film is more an example of amorality than a comment on it. Armitage employs his action maestro’s facility in the same way that Junior sports his badge--as a cover for some pretty queasy antics.

To this end, the casting of Alec Baldwin as Junior is shrewd. Baldwin’s live-wire athleticism in the role is immensely appealing even when you’re recoiling from his brutality. Baldwin doesn’t have the kind of shadowed depths than a young De Niro might have brought to the role, or that Ray Liotta brought to a similar role in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild.” (Demme, who worked with Armitage during their Corman years, is the film’s co-producer.) With Baldwin, the explosiveness seems to come out of nowhere, out of some tiny slit in Junior’s soul.

The slight opaqueness that I always detect in Baldwin’s acting is well-suited to “Miami Blues.” It makes his actions seem less humanly rooted, and therefore less disturbing. His psychosis is cartoonized, just as the dogged heroism of Fred Ward’s mangy Hoke, whose dentures are stolen along with his badge, is caricatured. Ward is well paired with Baldwin; he has his own rangy athleticism, and a squashed palooka’s mug that might have sprung from the pages of the Sunday funnies.

One reason this film isn’t as good as “Something Wild” is that it doesn’t deepen as it goes along. It doesn’t make us reexamine our response to violence, or make our laughter stick in our throats. There are some wonderful missed opportunities for a richer film. The notion that Junior is posing as a cop is funny enough, but we don’t see how the impersonation distorts his personality, how it imparts a screwy, fake righteousness to his scams. Junior is never really confused as to which side of the law he is on.

In the scenes between Junior and Leigh’s sweetly dim hooker Susie, Armitage seems to be pushing a satire of middle-class domesticity. Susie, with whom Junior sets up house, has a cozy fantasy of what married life will be like with her new beau. To the film’s credit, her daydreams of babies and white picket fences are presented without condescension, and Leigh’s fine, lived-in performance extends our sympathies. Leigh makes us understand Susie’s yearnings for a normal life, so that she willfully refuses to see the worst in Junior. The idea that this innocent babe and Junior are supposed to be some kind of mock-ideal middle-class couple is a good sick joke, but Armitage doesn’t seem to have his heart in it.

Is it because the satire doesn’t provide enough action opportunities? This is the problem with the action-filmmaker’s anything-for-a-jolt ethos: Whatever doesn’t jump-start the story is skimped. In fact, in “Miami Blues,” the story is all jump-starts. I realize that this may be all that most people require from a glorified programmer like “Miami Blues,” but the film has so much finesse, and its best moments are so freakishly dippy, that you regret the devaluation. Like Susie, you yearn for higher pleasures, and what you get for your troubles is a snazzy con job.