n last year's "Ronin", director John Frankenheimer set forth a primer on film car chases, equaling Friedken's work in
"The French Connection" and "To Live and Die in L.A.", and surpassing Peter Yates in "Bullitt" (though, "The Seven Ups"
has the best car chase scene in film history). It gave me hope that the art was not dead.
In James Foley's The Corruptor, you can see the worst car chase in all of film, a 25 mile per hour snorefest through
the alleys of NYC's Chinatown. One straight line, very low speed, back and forth, back and forth. One Adam 12 had wilder
high speed pursuits.
The "chase" is indicative of Foley's ineptitude with the action genre. His principals - Mark Wahlberg and Yun Fat Chow -
kill everyone in sight with handguns, loaded by their inexhaustible supply of clips. And if you are firing at Wahlberg or
Chow with a machine gun, you will miss, but you will also break a lot of glass. Indeed, the opening action sequence is
a shootout in a lamp and ceramic store.
This should not be surprising. Foley's better work has been in the non-action category (Glen Garry Glen Ross and After
Dark, My Sweet). But all The Corruptor could hope to offer was spellbinding action sequences, given its humdrum and
hackneyed script.
In a nutshell: Old vet meets young rookie, who has been assigned to Chinatown. Old vet tells young rookie,
"You don't change Chinatown. It changes you." Or something like that, because Chow's English is a little rocky,
so the line may come across as follow: "Ru don chanse Chintown. It chanses ru." Thereafter, we here the patented dow,
dow, ding of Chinese massage music.
Chow's principal strength is an ability to make his eyes go all crazy just before he's about to shoot a bunch of guys.
Wahlberg, who can be effective when leashed very tight, merely sleepwalks through this disaster.
