The Corruptor * * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp
"The Corruptor" is a mixture of Hong Kong arcade-action cinema and Sydney Pollack-esque New York crime drama, and what's surprising is that the hybrid seems to work. It concerns two New York City detectives -- played by Chow Yun- Fat and Mark Wahlberg (who gets better every time I see him) -- who get sucked into a complex plot of double-crossings and betrayals. It's one of those movies that makes more sense after it's over, but is quite a ride while it's still unspooling.
Chow Yun-Fat's cop is one of those guys who "frisks" someone by smashing his face into a brick wall while lifting the guy's cigarettes. Wahlberg's detective is more reserved and thoughtful, and has been assigned to Yun-Fat's department to handle a possible organized-crime connection. The two don't like each other very much -- and in fact learn to hate each other's guts enormously, especially after both of them may turn out to be dirty and on the take.
And more than that I'm not sure I should give away, since at about the halfway mark there are a series of revelations which, instead of seeming tacked-on as gratuitous plot-twists, give everything we've seen before a new and ominous resonance. (There's even a subplot about the Wahlberg character's father, which at first seems gratuitous, but soon turns out to be organically connected to everything.) The movie, instead of getting dumber, gets smarter and less beholden to formulas as it goes on. That's rare.
After the visually-enticing but otherwise shallow "Replacement Killers" (which I still admired for its bombasticity), Chow Yun-Fat now has his first English- speaking dramatic role as a New York cop in "The Corruptor". He plays the role -- a tough-as-rusty-nails detective -- with all the eye-rolling, evil-smirking over-the-top-ness that he brought to many of his more outre' Hong Kong roles. But instead of seeming out of place, he hardly seems to be able to catch up with the manic pace of the movie he's in: he seems like a caged animal, trying frantically to chew its way out. Wahlberg, cerebral and at times exhausted, comes off as someone who knew exactly what he was getting into from the moment he stepped on screen -- even if we don't know what that is. His performance fills in what we don't know factually by being emotionally complete.
I was surprised to hear how universally derided "The Corruptor" was. This is a good, gritty film that knows its material well, and wraps it in a slick and entertaining package. A friend of mine slammed the film as being "predictable". Maybe its plot is predictable, but the way we get to the ending we're expecting doesn't come the way we'd expect. And if every story were unpredictable, then fiction as a device would be semipointless: the point is not to get something you can't anticipate, but to get it in a way you can't anticipate.
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