Okay, to start off with, apparently "stumer" is British slang for a counterfeiter. Yeah, I never heard it used, either. And this movie is nowhere near as violent or salacious as the cover art -- which features women under obvious distress, as well as a child being "warmed up" by a welding torch -- would lead you to believe.

At the end of the day, The End of the Stumer is your garden-variety cheap shot in the Mainland and sent straight to DVD police procedural action/drama. I guess we might at least be grateful that it was actually shot and edited via actual film stock, rather than some janky-ass digital video crud.

Kent Cheng is really the only real "star" present here with any sort of meat to their role -- and it looks and feels like he did this movie to pay off his dim sum tab at the local eatery. Anyway, he plays a cop named Nam, who is pursuing the titular stumer, a smarmy Taiwanese chap called Fang (Lin Wai-Kin) that offed Nam's wife (Cecilia Yip) during a botched robbery attempt.

Nam's superior (Woo Kung-Yue) thinks that he is too close to the case, and so makes him take a little vacation. Sitting at home and being hen-pecked by his sister-in-law, Yun (Lui Kit), and ignored by his child (Wan King-Lam) doesn't sit too well with Nam, so he decides to help out the detective working on the case, Cheng (Pang Hing-Wah).

Nam and Cheng look to be close to cracking the case until Fang uses his relationship with Yun to set up a trap, which threatens to take away the last few threads of a family Nam has.

For most of its' running time, The End of the Stumer revolves somewhere being just merely passable. In many instances, it even veers into the "total mind-numbing crap" territory, with a lot of throwaway scenes that manage to be quite boring, even though they are obviously "inspired" by the better efforts in the genre like A Better Tomorrow and Lethal Weapon.

However, Kent Cheng puts in a very good performance -- it's really a hell of a lot better than one might expect from this type of movie and/or role, which gives the viewer a solid buffer to stave away a lot of the chum floating about here.

And, like the cheapie low-budget pics from the 80's that so many HK film fans hold dear, the action quotient of the proceedings is noticeably ratcheted up during the final reel. It's not enough to elevate this movie anywhere above the realm of the squarely average, but as the DVD ejected from my player, this reviewer didn't feel like The End of the Stumer was a total waste of their time.

RATING: 5