Undercover Blues is an apt name for this movie, since most every scene seems to be bathed in a sea of blue light. Taking more than a little cue from Johnnie To's classic gangster film The Mission, Undercover Blues uses a lot of flashy visuals. But, unlike To's masterpiece, once you peel back the facade of this picture, there's very little actual substance under the surface.

This movie mines the tried-and-true story of a undercover cop who gets in too deep. The cop in question is Joe (Daniel Wu), a promising young cadet who is selected to infiltrate the "family" of Spanner (Blacky Ko), one of the biggest drug runners in Asia.

Joe is good at his job -- too good -- and soon finds himself becoming one of Spanner's most trusted associates. It's up to Joe's captain, Frank (Ray Lui), to head over to Malaysia and try to pull Joe back into the "real" world.

Director Billy Chung has spent most of his career seemingly trying to become the next Wong Jing by piggybacking his productions off of a popular style of the time, whether it's Category III exploitation stuff like Love to Kill, nonsense comedies such as Kung Fu Mahjong, or girls-with-guns action-fests, as witnessed with the inventively titled Lady Supercop.

At this point in time, the "new wave" crime movies popularized by the output of Milkyway Films were gaining both local and international notoriety, so, not surprisingly, Undercover Blues apes many of the stylistic elements of those movies.

Undercover Blues does everything technically well, but nothing ever seems to really fire on all cylinders. Most of this feeling can really be placed squarely on the feet of Ray Lui. He's one of the most boring Hong Kong actors ever, and his sleep-walking excuse of a performance here does nothing to dispel that notion.

The other actors try to do what they can -- Simon Lui especially has a glimmer of hope as a cop who has already gone over the top and embraced the Triad lifestyle -- but given that they are basically aping cardboard cutouts of Triad drama caricatures, it's pretty much an exercise in futility to get the viewer to be fully invested in the characters and their possible fates.

Billy Chung does try to liven things with some good old-fashioned ultra-violence, most notably a scene where the film tries to outdo Reservoir Dogs via a torture scene where both ears are sliced off of a poor sap. The effort was appreciated by this reviewer, but the excitement effect of the claret wears off fairly quickly.

Perhaps if Undercover Blues had concentrated more on the naughty bits, it might have been a more notable movie. At least there would have been something more interesting to see than a bunch of B-list actors going through the motions of what most Hong Kong film viewers have seen many times before.

Still, there's nothing horribly wrong with this production, and it's probably worth a late-night viewing if you're fan of the genre, especially if you're not feeling particularly nit-picky.

RATING: 6