UNIQUE INSANITY OF 'TIME AND TIDE'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

One of the advertising lines for ``Time and Tide'' is ``Sometimes you can't tell who's shooting whom.''

Promotional blurbs are rarely so honest.

Deliriously dancing on the edge of incoherence for much of its running time, this latest Hong Kong gangster mash from respected stylist Tsui Hark (``Peking Opera Blues,'' the ``Once Upon a Time in China'' series) ultimately makes some story sense. Whether you bother following it through its confusing path when you can just sit back and enjoy the hypercrazed action is up to you.

In one of many borrowings from his former colleague John Woo, Tsui builds his story - after some while - around the bond that develops between two young men on opposite sides of a violent chasm.

Tyler (Hong Kong pop star Nicholas Tse) is a directionless ne'er-do-well who figures he'd better do something when a woman he was seeing (Cathy Chui) announces that she's pregnant. Even though she wants nothing to do with the lad - and loudly proclaims her lesbianism whenever Tyler gets too close - the kid joins an ad hoc bodyguard service his loan shark uncle has formed exclusively of deadbeats who owe him money.

Meanwhile, Jack (Taiwanese pop star Wu Bai), who in the past was a mercenary in South America, wants to settle down with his own expectant wife, Hui (Candy Lo). Trouble is, she's the rebel daughter of a crime tong kingpin who, for some reason, has been targeted by a mob of Jack's former Brazilian colleagues. When Tyler's inept firm hires on to protect the Chinese godfather, he meets Jack and they connect. Time and tide and ridiculous narrative complications then force them to work with and against one another through a bewildering series of ballistic ballets.

Filled with oblique angles, unexplained jumps in chronology and location shifts, disorienting disguises and pacing hiccups, ``Time and Tide'' is very much the work of a director trying to call attention to himself. This is not something that Tsui needs to do. His innovative formal mastery has been showcased for years in less fractured films. And Tsui pulls off enough genuine staging coups here - such as an explosion from the blasting bomb's point of view, or an x-ray of a pistol's inner workings from the perspective of a guy staring down its barrel - to make his dizzier flourishes play like exercises in lily-gilding.

Then again, Tsui also seems to be interested in putting his own spin on the stylistic trademarks of some of his Hong Kong brethren here, and fans of the enclave's cinema should enjoy spotting the references. Tyler's quixotic efforts at emotional connection, as well as some electric lighting choices and time-spindling step-editing and freeze-framing, recall the arty obsessions of Wong Kar-Wai. A bloody car chase/shootout in a spiral parking structure turns camera-boggling twists on a favorite Jackie Chan situation.

And the Woo motifs go much further than previously mentioned, from pigeons in the line of fire to a climactic bloodbath in a train station that, though hardly as brilliant as the ``Hard-Boiled'' hospital showdown it's modeled on, audaciously ups the ante by having Hui give birth in the middle of the deadly action.

Some may see this as little more than derivative. But ``Time and Tide'' touches everything with an insanity uniquely its own.

``TIME AND TIDE''

(Rated R: violence, language, graphic childbirth)

The stars: Nicholas Tse, Wu Bai, Anthony Wong, Candy Lo, Cathy Chui.

Behind the scenes: Directed and produced by Tsui Hark. Written by Ko Chiu Lam and Tsui Hark. Released by TriStar Pictures.

Running time: One hour, 51 minutes.

Playing: Nuart, West L.A.

Our rating: Three stars