This is very much the kind of film that I enjoy as a rule and enjoy it I did but while it was good it could have been great. The titular character is played by one of the new leading lights of the Hong Kong entertainment industry the perma-tanned Louis Koo and he is joined in the film by the ever reliable talent that is Jordan Chan who is perhaps best known for the role of Chicken in the "Young And Dangerous" films and everyone's favourite uncle Blackie Ko (you may remember him from Jet Lee's "My Father Is A Hero").

The director of this slice of celluloid is the sleazemaster himself Herman Yau - for those that don't know or for those that do but wish that they didn't he was responsible for the Category III classics that are "The Untold Story" and "Ebola Syndrome" which both starred Anthony Wong. The two of them are kind of like Martin Scorcese and Robert De Niro but with a lot more on the grossness, blood and meat cleaver fronts and for me it's about time they made another shocker to rival those two formidable movies.

What prevents this movie being great isn't really the actors or even the script which is the more common problem. The fly in this ointment is the action or rather the level of the action - what there is is quality stuff but it is neither long enough or intense enough and to be perfectly honest I would expect a Herman Yau film to deliver on that front in a very big way. I got the distinct impression when watching this film that he was being hemmed in and I really felt that he was itching to let rip in his customary fashion - it may well have been that he was contractually obliged to deliver a IIb rated film. The storyline suits his style down to the ground and I can see in my mind what he could have done with it.

The Masked Prosecutor (Louis Koo) is a cop with vengeance on his mind. He was jailed for accidentally shooting his partner and then shooting a drug dealer who had given himself up in order to hide that mistake thereby making his second. He operates on a strange mixture of emotions - it's partly guilt at shooting his partner who is his fiancee's younger brother and partly a sense of injustice that he was jailed while other criminals go free on technicalities.

There are a number of touches in the film that really work but by the same token a number of things that aren't fully utilised as storyline elements - the rapid mask changing is perhaps the most interesting but is also the least used. This is an entertaining film that I would recommend although not wholeheartedly - the feeling that I was left with at the end was one of slight disappointment that it hadn't reached the heights (or depths depending on your point of view) that it should have.