Wong Jing’s bent cop saga about the founding of the Independent Commission Against Corruption has lofty ambitions to be a crime epic to rival the very greatest of the genre. Spanning the best part of a decade and intersecting the lives of numerous characters, the film features a stellar cast and a colonial-era setting, which might suggest some heavyweight hi-brow entertainment. I Corrupt All Cops (or ICAC, get it?) is not that but, despite its flaws, remains Wong’s most ambitious outing for quite some time.

The film wavers between dark tales of greed, corruption and decadence, frequent diversions into broad comedy and sudden moments of shockingly brutal violence. The result is patchy and uneven, with little sense of period setting beyond a few old cars, and numerous underdeveloped or redundant plot threads and character arcs, most noticeably our supposed protagonist, Gale, (Eason Chan). His character is a dogsbody, or ‘bootlicker’ to Tony Leung’s corrupt Chief Inspector Lak. He runs errands, cleans up after his boss’s increasingly violent and erratic behaviour, and has found himself in the bizarre position of frequently having to marry his superiors’ mistresses to help them elude detection. To date, Gale has nine wives, none of whom he loves, but in return he is given a handsome dowry to support them all, with enough left over for himself. He has a son and daughter, who may or may not be his, and a resigned nonchalance to his increasingly surreal home life.

While set up as the sympathetic whistleblower of the piece, Gale’s character ultimately goes nowhere. He has neither the arrogance to stand up to the ICAC when they come knocking nor the moral conscience to switch sides and fight for what is good and pure. He is furnished with a single genuine love interest, simply referred to as Wife No 4 (Kate Tsui), whom he mostly ignores in favour of mob boss Rose (Liu Yang), whose story and motivations are also criminally underdeveloped.

The calibre of the cast is surprisingly high, only further illustrating the good will and importance that the local industry has bestowed upon this project. Eason Chan’s affable if, as previously mentioned, ineffectual foot soldier is portrayed with the same goofy earnestness one has come to expect from the star. He struggles to accept the way his superiors are taking him, yet feels powerless to do anything about them. He shies away from his household of spouses, yet happily goes toe-to-toe with the intimidating and self-reliant Rose. He even manages to squeeze in a Bruce Lee impersonation for good measure.
Tony Leung Ka Fai presents a more slapdash, less terrifying version of his Big D role from Election, making for a somewhat cartoonish villain who only occasionally convinces as he did so memorably in Johnnie To’s film. Anthony Wong is dependable as ever as Unicorn, the mid-level cop sidelined by Lak, who switches sides more out of revenge than any sense of duty. Alex Fong’s role as Bong, the victim-turned-enforcer might have made for a more interesting and logical focus point for the story, but is instead also largely sidelined, but Bowie Lam makes for a stalwart father figure and pillar of righteousness as ICAC founder member, Inspector Yin.

The film’s biggest single weakness is, sadly, its direction. It is evident, in the spiralling muddle of characterisation and plotting, that the film needs a director with an assured sense of mood, atmosphere, tension and gravitas – qualities that Wong sadly lacks. A domino effect of increasingly intriguing events unfurl before the viewer, yet more often than not fall flat due to the loose and stylistically barren direction. The irony of all this is that Wong Jing the actor is without doubt one of the best things about the movie. His portrayal of spineless “collector” Gold invigorates the proceedings every time he is on screen, ably holding his own, and even stealing scenes from the likes of Tony Leung and Anthony Wong. That is not to say that the rest of the cast are dragging their feet, but rather that Wong clearly knows exactly where the cameras are and fully exploits his screen time with a Cheshire Cat grin and all-round deliciously duplicitous performance.

In the end I Corrupt All Cops proves to be something of a missed opportunity. It covers potentially fascinating subject matter and is not without its merits, but I struggled to take any more than a passing interest, due to some languid pacing, unsuitable characterization and a rather lacklustre sense of real drama. I couldn’t help but imagine that in the hands of a more austere director, such as Andrew Lau or Johnnie To, the results might have been something truly memorable. James Marsh