'Corruptor': Delectable Chow In a Thin Stew By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 12, 1999

Mark Wahlberg and Chow Yun-Fat are partners against crime in "The Corruptor." (New Line Cinema) Director: James Foley Cast: Chow Yun-Fat; Mark Wahlberg; Ric Young; Jon Kit Lee; Elizabeth Lindsey; Byron Mann; Andrew Pang Running Time: 1 hour, 51 minutes Extreme violence and sexuality

The good news: Chow is fabulous, his English far improved over last year's somewhat incomprehensible "The Replacement Killers," his acting far livelier and compelling, his action skills just as cool as ever.

The bad news: After a sensational beginning, the movie loses its way in the late going and somehow doesn't deliver. You don't walk out in that high state of wilted bliss that the craziest, the most audacious of the Chow Yun-Fat-John Woo films ("The Killer," "Hardboiled") put you into, that sense of guilty pleasure jacked up to criminal intensity. You walk out with the following word etched in the frontal lobes of your brain: "Huh?"

Fat plays Nick Chen, a fabled New York police lieutenant who runs the Asian Gang Unit; that is, he patrols Chinatown. The issue of the moment is the arrival of a punk gang to challenge the long mandarin stewardship of C-town's emperor, Uncle Wong, and the ambiguous ambitions of Wong's oily second-in-command, Henry Lee (Ric Young).

Director Jim Foley does a fabulous job setting up the gritty sense of a slightly heightened reality. This is the Chinatown beloved of American movies since at least Warner Oland's day as Charlie Chan, possibly racist but still a spicy underworld: Life is cheap, drugs and women abundant, and killers lurk in every alley. Are those firecrackers or Uzis? Is the guy in the dragon mask a friend or a foe? Why is there smoke and neon everywhere? Is Chow's sardonic smile the smile of a lone ranger of virtue or a corrupt ironist? Nothing is what it seems.

But into this completely Asian world, a haircut with a boy attached is mysteriously inserted, as Chen receives a new partner, named Danny Wallace, played by Mark Wahlberg. So immediately a couple of ancient gambits are invoked, the fish-out-of-water thing and the rookie thing. See: It's a rookie fish out of water.

At first, particularly when Wallace tries to mingle with Chen's two other unit members, the movie is fun in that bantering way that American movies seem to do so well. Chen and Wallace reach a state of male bonding, across both experiential and cultural gulfs. That works well and comes to an amusing climax in the movie's best set piece, an especially brutal and kinetic car chase that harks back more to the kind of nihilistic frenzy of the Hong Kong gangster pictures than to the less insane chases in "The French Connection," "The Seven-Ups" or "Bullitt."

But then the plot takes a twisted leap into exponential expansion when it becomes more interested in Wallace than in Chen; this young haircut, not that interesting, turns out to have a secret identity and a drunken father (Brian Cox) hanging around, trying to cadge money. Excuse me, shouldn't this stuff have been saved for "The Corruptor II: Father Doesn't Know Best"?

In the end, the movie atomizes; it flies apart under the conflicting energies of too many plot twists going in too many different directions. And the last action sequence is pretty lame, given some of the spectacular mayhem that's come before, though I did like it when a bad guy (this is a first in movie deaths, I think) got simultaneously shot, scorched, set on fire and hung in chains. That rivals a scene in a forgotten Hong Kong movie where Chow kills a guy by blowing up a basketball in a microwave. Hmmm. No, it doesn't, come to think of it.