The Corruptor (1999)

  Hey, remember that time Marky Mark teamed up with the Crouching Tiger guy to fight crime in Chinatown?  Yeah, me neither.

Detective Nick Chen (Chow Yun-Fat) is one of the top cops in the 6th Precinct's Organized Crime division.  Lately, they have been monitoring the rivalry between established crime boss Benny Wong (Kim Chan) and the Fukinese Dragons, led by Bobby Vu (Byron Mann).  Nobody knows it, but Chen has been deep in Benny Wong's pocket for years.  He doesn't like it but sees it as the cost of doing business.  Then Wong's lieutenant, Henry Lee (Ric Young), starts targeting the newest member of Chen's team, newbie cop Danny Wallace (Mark Wahlberg).  Chen doesn't want to see Wallace go down the same path he did, but is having some trouble trying to find a way to alert him without revealing his own corruption.

I was hoping this would be one of those unfairly maligned gems that people dismissed but should be given a second look, but it's not.  It's not a very good movie at all.  Chow Yun-Fat is a great actor, especially with action, but his accent is so pronounced in this film that it's hard to understand what he's saying.  I almost wish they had just let him speak Chinese the whole time.  This was super-early in Wahlberg's career and it was probably still a big step up for him, but it's a total trainwreck to watch.  Also, you can blame typecasting for this, but Ric Young has never played a good character in any movie I've seen.  He always plays an evil, usually perverted, bastard.

I liked this movie when they remade it as Romeo Must Die.

In more TV news, I just finished all five seasons of Daria, and I have to say that show remains compulsively watchable.  I know I caught random episodes when they originally aired but I don't think I'd ever seen them all.  Every time a disc came in the mail, I found myself watching the entire thing at three hours a pop.  And I was always disappointed that there weren't more when I hit the last episode of each disc.  That is so rare with a 90's show as to be remarked upon.