Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

The Corruptor Blu-ray Movie Review

"It's Chinatown."

Reviewed by Michael Reuben April 4, 2015

The Corruptor was the second American film made by Hong Kong star Chow Yun-Fat (after The Replacement Killers), and it begins with a bang, literally. Because the film contains several major shootouts and a protracted car chase through the narrow streets of downtown Manhattan, the marketers at New Line Cinema tried to make it look like the John Woo-directed action extravaganzas that had made Chow an international star. But The Corruptor doesn't resemble such ballets of violence as The Killer or Hard Boiled, despite efforts to suggest otherwise in the trailer. The script by actor Robert Pucci has more in common with Seventies dramas in which no one is what they seem and everyone has secrets. Director James Foley had never seen a Hong Kong action film before he read Pucci's script, and he wasn't interested in making one. What attracted him to The Corruptor was the characters and their moral dilemmas.

Perhaps because The Corruptor wasn't what Chow's fan base was expecting, it did poorly with both critics and audiences, but the film is overdue for rediscovery. Pucci's story was based on real gang wars that had rocked New York's Chinatown in the early Nineties and prompted the creation of a special task force by the NYPD. Despite extensive research, however, the writer maintained his focus on the plight of individuals caught in webs of intrigue and forced to choose repeatedly between the lesser of two evils. As Foley observes in his commentary, the two cops at the heart of The Corruptor are constantly on the run, barely able to keep up with events around them, never able to step back and assess where their choices are taking them—until they find themselves at the mercy of a cheerful villain (the "corruptor" of the title) who has the power to destroy them both.

A gang war has erupted in New York's Chinatown between the traditional Triad, the Tongs, and the upstart Fukienese Dragons, a cadre of flamboyant street punks whose use of extreme violence makes headlines. When a daytime bombing by the Dragons kills a tourist, the NYPD assigns an up-and-coming white detective, Danny Wallace (Mark Wahlberg), to the anti-gang task force headed by Det. Nick Chen (Chow Yun-Fat), both as a publicity stunt and to satisfy Chen's repeated requests for more staff. Chen is furious. It's hard enough to persuade Chinatown residents to talk to any police officer, let alone a white one. The other two members of the task force, Willy Ung (Andrew Pang) and Louise Deng (Elizabeth Lindsay), are Chinese-American.

Reluctantly, and with great doubt about Wallace's abilities, Chen puts him in the field and introduces him to the frustrating puzzle that is Chinatown. For weeks, the team has been finding bodies of young women in dumpsters with no identification or reports of anyone missing. They are illegal immigrants lured to America, forced into prostitution and executed when they rebel. Wallace is appalled at the lack of investigation by the task force, but there is nothing to investigate: no witnesses, no usable evidence and nothing to connect the victims to either of the warring gangs. No one in Chinatown will inform against the head of the Tongs, Uncle Benny (Kim Chan), or his chief lieutenant, Henry Lee (Ric Young), because their roots in the community are deep and extensive. As for the Fukienese Dragons, led by the hot-tempered Bobby Vu (Byron Mann), anyone offering to assist the police against the Dragons doesn't last long. Machine guns are the Dragons' weapon of choice, as the task force is reminded when they raid a house of prostitution that several members of the Dragons happen to be patronizing. The sequence is memorable for Foley's orchestration of intensive exchanges of gunfire within a confined and claustrophobic space.

Chen doesn't expect Wallace to remain, but Wallace stubbornly persists, and the more he perseveres, the more he gets tripped up. A routine drug bust nets an FBI informant of which the police were unaware, which brings a Special Agent named Schabacker (Paul Ben-Victor) roaring into the precinct hurling accusations. Chen makes a deal with the FBI to release everyone arrested in the sweep, so that the informant's cover is maintained, but now the Bureau begins eyeing both Chen and Wallace (while they, in turn, have their suspicions about Schabacker).

Always lurking in the shadows is the ever-smiling Henry Lee, who, despite being a known criminal, thinks nothing of approaching Det. Chen and asking to be introduced to his new partner. Ric Young has worked steadily as a character actor since the 1960s (most famously as one of Lao Che's sons in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), but director Foley cast him as the lead villain in The Corruptor after a lengthy search, because, according to Foley, Young "giggled" during his audition, while everyone else was deadly serious. Young's Henry Lee is disarmingly good-natured and polite (one might almost say subservient). Only gradually does Wallace begin to understand what Chen already knows: that Lee is a master strategist who has become the true head of the Tongs, reducing Uncle Benny to a figurehead. Lee has also mastered the art (perfected by such real-life gangsters as Whitey Bulger) of manipulating law enforcement to squelch his rivals. "Don't worry", he says, while passing Wallace valuable information about an open case, "this is how things get done in Chinatown." The tip wins Wallace a medal, acceptance from his peers and the gratifying sense of having accomplished some good in the world. But now he owes Henry Lee.

Over and over, Foley keeps bringing The Corruptor back to the drama of two men who mean well but keep being tempted, not with money, drugs or sex (though those are also offered) but with the chance to make a difference. An admirer of The French Connection, Foley stages a car chase so brutally effective in its toll on civilians that the MPAA insisted that the sequence be trimmed—the subject is discussed in the extras—but in Foley's mind, he wasn't making an action movie, just recreating what would happen if cops like Chen and Wallace found themselves pursuing two ruthless assassins with automatic weapons. (As Foley notes in his commentary, when The French Connection was released, there was no such genre as "action movies".) Foley is just as interested in the dynamics of such scenes as those between Wallace and his estranged father, a former cop (Brian Cox), whose gambling debts have put his life at risk. Wallace's father thereby becomes potential leverage against the young detective, just as the hooker, for whom Chen has feelings, May (Marie Matiko), is potential leverage against Wallace's older partner. Henry Lee, of course, makes it his business to have his fingers on all such pressure points.

Foley has said that some of his producers wanted him to resolve The Corruptor with bullets, and there is certainly no lack of gunfire in the final act, as Chen and Wallace are steered to a meeting at the New Jersey docks that each of them believes will allow them to bring an end to the Chinatown gang war. By this point, however, the partners are traveling on different paths, having become separated in the maze of conflicting loyalties and schemes that is, as Lee said, how things are done in Chinatown. Foley's resolution is less Hong Kong and more classic Hollywood, and The Corruptor is better off for it.

The Corruptor Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Corruptor was shot by Spanish cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía, who had previously shot At Close Range and Glengarry Glen Ross for director Foley and would later reunite with him for Confidence. (Anchía is also a regular collaborator with writer/director David Mamet, most recently on the HBO original film, Phil Spector.) In his commentary, Foley describes the visual strategy that he, Anchía and production designer David Brisbin developed for heightening the realistic texture of The Corruptor into something resembling a "fever dream": bold, bright colors, without departing too far from reality; bright shafts of light cutting through spaces; narrow streets, alleyways and halls wherever possible.

One of the fortunate side effects of Anchía's lighting for The Corruptor is that it creates sharp contrasts that transfer well to video. Warner/New Line's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray sports a sharp and detailed image with beautifully saturated and often intense washes of bright color, especially in Chinatown's night life. But even in such seemingly ordinary settings as a police awards ceremony, the sea of blue uniforms is more intensely blue; or when a cab get smashed up during the big car chase, the taxi is slightly more yellow. Everything is brighter, sharper, exaggerated, with the occasional exception of a scene where one can barely make out figures in the darkness, e.g., when the cops discover smuggled Chinese illegals being held captive. Nighttime blacks are solid and dark, all the better for the boldly illuminated city to stand out against them. The film's grain pattern is visible but extremely fine.

Warner/New Line has placed The Corruptor on a BD-50 but, as is customary with Warner Home Video, left much of the space empty; the total disc image is 29 GB. The film has been mastered with an average bitrate of 26.25 Mbps, which is on the high side for Warner and not at all bad, even for a film with The Corruptor's major action scenes. Certainly the video quality did not appear to suffer, other than some minor aliasing on one aerial shot of the city.

The Corruptor Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Corruptor features a powerful, aggressive and immersive 5.1 surround mix, which has been encoded on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA. The opening attack by the Fukienese Dragons doesn't hold back sonically, as bullets fly and an explosion reverberates. Chen is introduced with equal ferocity, as he battles a group of Dragons in a local lamp store, where shattering glass adds counterpoint to the roar of gunfire. The extended car chase is a symphony of screeching tires, sudden impacts, weapons fire and horrified screams. The climactic shootout, which occurs in a ship's interior, adds echoes, creaks and the clank of chains and maritime machinery.

Quieter moments are also noteworthy, especially where Foley and the sound team mute background noise to emphasize a line of dialogue. (Foley points out one important example in his commentary.) The precinct, Lee's bathhouse headquarters and Wallace's apartment are notable examples of environments with subtle but specific ambiance.

The score for The Corruptor is a distinctive mix of original music by Carter Burwell (in the DVD's additional commentary, Foley calls it "the first melancholy action movie" score) and driving hip-hop songs from such artists as Mobb Deep, Spice 1 and Mystikal. The latter was used because hip-hop was the signature music of the gang on which the Fukienese Dragons were modeled. It is unfortunate that the DVD's isolated music track has not been ported to Blu-ray; the blending of these two disparate styles is truly unusual.

The Corruptor Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The Corruptor was released on DVD in 1999 as part of the New Line Cinema "Platinum Series" and some, but not all, of the extras from that DVD have made it to Blu-ray. Omitted is an isolated score track, an extensive gallery of production and concept stills, DVD-ROM features (including the screenplay) and a useful index to director Foley's commentary track.

Portions of Foley's commentary have also been omitted. Commentary tracks are often edited together from more than one session, and the producers of the Platinum Series DVD chose to include an additional forty minutes of commentary on a second track, which was available from the commentary index. Topics included "Why I Want to Work with Actors"; "A Line Cut out in the Massage Room"; "Any Film Has a Number of Mistakes"; "Why MPAA Cuts Are Bugging Me"; and "The Score". None of this additional commentary has been included on the Blu-ray.

• Commentary with Director James Foley: Foley is refreshingly open and direct in his discussion of how he tried to make a drama that happened to have major action sequences. He addresses both the film's technical demands and its major themes, and he notes many elements contributed by both Chow Yun-Fat and Mark Wahlberg. The commentary was recorded on the day of the film's release.



• From the Underground Up: The Making of The Corruptor (480i; 1.33:1): Unlike the DVD, where this documentary played as a single feature, each section listed below must be played separately. There is no "play all" function. The participants include director Foley, writer Pucci, producer Dan Halsted, stars Chow and Wahlberg, as well as other cast members. Substantial on-set and on-location footage is included. The titles of the individual sections are arbitrary; for example, the "cast" section includes detailed discussion of Pucci's research.
• The Research: Beneath the Streets (3:04).
• The Cast: East Meets West (5:36).
• The Production: Action with Character (8:40).
• The Director: The Close-Up (13:42).
• The Car Chase: The Unedited, Unrated Version (6:13): The introduction to this chapter by producer Dan Halsted has been moved to the end of the previous section ("The Director"). The sequence has also been incorrectly mastered in compressed anamorphic format, so that the aspect ratio is 1.78:1 instead of 2.40:1. Settings on your player or display device may be used to expand the image to its correct format. Following the unedited car chase sequence, there is an additional set of interviews with Foley and Halsted (3:38).
• The Marketing: Building the Trailer (5:13): Lori Drazen of New Line discusses the concepts underlying the trailer. Excerpts from two early attempts are included.



• UGK "Take It Off" Music Video (480i; 1.85:1; 4:44).



• Theatrical Trailer (480i; 1;85:1, enhanced; 1:54): "You don't change Chinatown. It changes you."

The Corruptor Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Among its many virtues, The Corruptor is the only film from Chow Yun-fat's brief career in American movies to capture the unique screen presence that electrified fans of his Hong Kong films. It turned out to be an advantage that James Foley wasn't overly familiar with Chow's previous work, because he was able to take the actor at face value and let him "play" freely. (Foley has said that he wanted to work with Chow from the instant he met him.) Above all, he gave Chow the freedom to invent the odd comedy beats— what Foley latter described as the "clown" hiding a secret pain—that make his Det. Nick Chen so unpredictable and compelling. Watch, for example, how he handles the two senior officers who reject his protests about Wallace being assigned to the task force; Chen turns it into a joke, but it's a joke that feels like a threat. Playing multiple thoughts and feelings at the same time is the hallmark of a great actor, and Chow is one of the best. He elevates The Corruptor in every scene. Highly recommended.