`THE CORRUPTOR' HAS ITS MOMENTS, IN BETWEEN CLICHES.Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic Remarkably well-crafted for a fundamentally unremarkable police thriller, ``The Corruptor's'' pleasures are modest but consistent. Set in Manhattan's Chinatown, it's a Ken Starr Era tale of professional compromise, personal betrayal and secret taping among New York's not-so-finest and competing underworld tongs tongs long-handled, about 3 feet, shaped like pincers with knobs on the ends of the grasping blades. Applied by standing behind the subject in a confined space and closing the jaws to grasp the animal's head just below the ears. . There's a spectacularly destructive car chase, lots of posturing by top Hong Kong Hong Kong (hŏng kŏng), Mandarin Xianggang, special administrative region of China, formerly a British crown colony (2005 est. pop. 6,899,000), land area 422 sq mi (1,092 sq km), adjacent to Guangdong prov. tender/tough guy Chow Yun-Fat
Chow Yun-Fat (Traditional Chinese: 周潤發; Simplified Chinese: and some streetwise street·wise adj. Having the shrewd awareness, experience, and resourcefulness needed for survival in a difficult, often dangerous urban environment. soul-searching from Mark Wahlberg For the actor and television game show host, see Mark L. Walberg. Mark Robert Michael Wahlberg (born June 5 1971) is an Academy Award-nominated American actor and television producer. . Cop or crook, everyone double-, triple- and octuple-crosses everybody else, and more people are shot up in under two hours than have probably been killed in New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of since Mayor Giuliani took over. Generic and junky as all this sounds, director James Foley (``After Dark, My Sweet,'' ``Glengarry Glen Ross''), instills more humor, suspense and moral intelligence into the piece than shoot-'em-ups usually bother with these days. Racial issues are handled with an interesting combination of in-your-face bluntness (when Wahlberg's detective Danny Wallace joins the all-Asian unit run by Chow's Nick Chen, his new colleagues bust his chops about only being there to meet Chinese girls) and drooling drooling the discharge of saliva from the mouth. A normal feature in some breeds of dogs such as St. Bernard, Newfoundland and English bulldog, presumably because of their loose, pendulous lips. hypocrisy (every opportunity to undress a young Asian woman is lovingly exploited). Similarly, some stereotypical exoticness is ascribed to a tong mobster or two. For the most part, though, the film manages to portray Chinese-American gang life persuasively, with a convincing mix of cultural specificity and all-American ruthlessness. Wahlberg gives another psychologically solid, unfussy un·fuss·y adj. 1. Not particular about or concerned with details. 2. Not cluttered or complicated, as with extraneous matters or details. performance, while Chow projects Eastwoodian formidability despite his penchant for pulling goofy faces. Together, they make one of the more engaging mismatched cop teams we've seen lately. And Foley places them in a palpably restricting world of, yes, endemic corruption, shot through with traps both ethical and physical. It's not ``Chinatown,'' Jake. But through efficient storytelling, a few distinctive ideas and superior craftsmanship, ``The Corruptor'' makes its case. THE FACTS The film: ``The Corruptor'' (R; violence, nudity, language). The stars: Chow Yun-Fat, Mark Wahlberg, Ric Young, Byron Mann, Brian Cox. Behind the scenes: Directed by James Foley. Written by Robert Pucci. Produced by Dan Halsted. Released by New Line Cinema. Running time: One hour, 51 minutes. Playing: Citywide Our rating: Three stars. |
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