After a sensational beginning, the movie loses its way in the late going and somehow doesn't deliver. Director Jim Foley does a fabulous job setting up the gritty sense of a slightly heightened reality. Life is cheap, drugs and women abundant, and killers lurk in every alley.
Nothing is what it seems.
But into this completely Asian world, a haircut with a boy attached is mysteriously inserted, as Chen receives a new partner, named Danny Wallace, played by Mark Wahlberg. At first, particularly when Wallace tries to mingle with Chen's two other unit members, the movie is fun in that bantering way that American movies seem to do so well. Chen and Wallace reach a state of male bonding, across both experiential and cultural gulfs. That rivals a scene in a forgotten Hong Kong movie where Chow kills a guy by blowing up a basketball in a microwave. No, it doesn't, come to think of it.