Brother Chow we call him, me and my friends. Last year's English-language The Replacement Killers, which introduced American audiences to Hong Kong's coolest export, saw Brother Chow playing such a pensive bore that many viewers justly scratched their heads and asked, "What's the big deal?" The Corruptor's director James Foley allows Brother Chow's charisma to shine through: whether eating a peanut or reaming out his partner for some lunkheaded police-work, Chow is so magnetic that it's impossible to look away when he's on screen in his second American picture.

True to form, Chow plays Nick Chen, a high-ranking Chinatown cop tracking Fukinese gang members responsible for a local bombing that accidentally killed a tourist. The higher-ups assign him a white partner, Danny Wallace (Mark Wahlberg), and Chen is understandably vocal about his fear that a Caucasian presence will jeopardize the good faith he has built up over time with the members, upstanding and otherwise, of his community. Wallace blends in well, though: he speaks Chinese and has been schooled in the nuances of the culture. Before long, Wallace is even taking bribes, as Chen has been doing for years, from oily crime boss Henry Lee (Ric Young).

Lee is the title character, a man who plays Iago to avoid warfare between the gangsters and the police, whispering secrets into the ears of whomever can help keep his whoring and gambling businesses intact. Chen hasn't lost all of his scruples, though, and Wallace will only take immorality so far, desperate as he is to overshadow the sullied reputation of his alcoholic ex-cop father (Brian Cox). Together, Chen and Wallace will attempt to outwit Lee, even if it means betraying each other in the process.

The Corruptor's formulaic script is enlivened by Chow's quirky performance and some snazzy action sequences. Wahlberg, unfortunately, is a wet noodle here, his every line of dialogue delivered with too much gravity and his dour presence doing battle with Chow's energy. Wahlberg was enjoyably nasty in his previous outing with Foley, the teen sex paranoia thriller Fear, but that may have been because the pair sent up, in canny ways, Wahlberg's Marky Mark persona. After Fear came Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, a box-office dud that nonetheless made Wahlberg a star.

Suddenly, Mark Wahlberg's a respected thespian, having shed the skin of his rapper/underwear model persona, and his portrayal of Danny Wallace smacks of self-consciousness, as if he's afraid we'll forget at any moment that he's now to be taken seriously as an actor. Wahlberg's solution is to refrain from cracking a smile and play every scene with the world's ills reflected in his glare--the last thing this underwritten character needs.

Foley's direction is also heavy-handed. His lighting design is impressive at first (the sun cuts through half-shut blinds and the like in criss-cross patterns, regardless of the location) until it occurs to you--at least, it occurred to me--that most police precincts are washed-out by overhead fluorescent bulbs. (Even David Fincher had the good sense to light a copshop like a copshop in the otherwise stark-looking Se7en.) His scene transition of choice also becomes monotonous, then unintentionally amusing: a sharp sweep-and-thud on the soundtrack always accompanied by an overhead establishing shot of New York's grey Chinatown district.

The shooting method of choice for Foley here--jittery, unmotivated zooms and offbeat close-ups--is also frequently inappropriate, much like that damn roving camera on TV's "NYPD Blue". His coverage works for the setpieces, such as Chow's first gunfight (masterfully executed), or the extremely violent car chase that erupts from nowhere at the midway point, but it's too portentous a style for the hush-hush conversations elsewhere in the picture.

New Line began work on their Platinum Series DVD of The Corruptor before the film even opened in cinemas; that kind of prep time shows when previewing this wonderful disc. Picture quality is customarily outstanding, given the studio, though I did find reds (and sometimes yellows and blues) to be a tad oversaturated at times, especially in the opening sequence, when the Fukinese Dragons exit their candy apple sportscar to inflict harm on a shopkeeper. (I can't imagine how LaserDisc and VHS will handle the film's intense colour scheme; DVD's lack of video noise saves The Corruptor's palette from the unstable nature of NTSC.) The 16x9-enhanced, 2.35:1 letterboxed image is otherwise fantastic. With all those shafts of light, the absence of banding or other MPEG-2 artifacts is a real achievement.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio on this disc is sure to become future sound demo material at my house. Basses are throbbing, the surrounds are nearly always active (there is a definitive split between the rears during the many shoot-outs), and voices are clear. Importantly, Carter Burwell's score sounds both crisp and unobtrusive whenever it chimes in. (There's even an isolated track featuring Burwell's Asian-flavoured music, in 5.1 and with commentary from the composer. This is a real treat for his fans, myself included. This score comes with a separate chapter index--for posterity, my favourite cue is 1M3, "Lamp Store Shoot Out," which could pass in a blind taste test for Ennio Morricone.) A 2.0 surround track is another option, one that I couldn't bear to sample after hearing the reference-quality six-track mix.

Foley checks in with a second feature length commentary, and while he did provide a few insights, he is not a humble man. (Foley never saw a Chow Yun-Fat movie before hiring him, and subsequently only watched half of two, the usual suspects The Killer and Hard-Boiled. He confesses he's not a fan of the Hong Kong action genre--if he were, The Corruptor might've been more playful for it.) Curiously, one can access from the creative animated menus "additional commentary" from Foley--I guess he couldn't squeeze in all he wanted to say into a two-hour slot.

I very much enjoyed the 50-minute documentary "From the (Under)Ground Up," also on this disc. It's similar to the fascinating making-of included on New Line's Rush Hour in that it's full of unedited behind-the-scenes footage, though none of it is as candid as Jackie Chan's heated choreography of a routine fight sequence. (That's perhaps my favourite supplement from any disc. Ever.) You also get to see the original car chase, a bloodbath that initially earned The Corruptor an NC-17. This is a real treat, though I would've appreciated some specific demonstrations of what was cut and why.

Standard DVD users can also sample a hokey music video by UGK (what does that stand for?), a trailer (5.1, anamorphic widescreen), and cast and crew bios. DVD-ROM content includes Robert Pucci's screenplay with scene access, plus interactive trivia, and a link to the Internet Movie Database. First Jackie Chan, now Chow Yun-Fat: New Line obviously wants to make names of these Hong Kong stars Stateside. That's nice, although both deserve better American material than what they've been handed up to now.-Bill Chambers