Chow Yun-Fat wears an Omega Speedmaster

Chow Yun-Fat spends one of The Corruptor's roughest scenes inside a Chinatown poultry shop, hanging ducks and red signage crowding the frame, his forearm jammed across another man's jaw. Nick Chen, the NYPD detective he plays, is not a careful man here. He is a cornered one. Chinatown cop dramas usually hand the white detective the hero's role and leave the Asian partner as the sidekick, and James Foley's 1999 film at least partly flips that. Chow is the lead, a veteran of the Asian Gang Unit who has been quietly taking money from the Tong for years, and Mark Wahlberg's Danny Wallace is the new partner sent in to learn the unit, or maybe to watch it. The picture spends its running time making you guess which of the two men is more compromised.

On his wrist, caught for a blurred instant during the struggle, is a round steel chronograph with a dark dial, the kind that reads as an Omega Speedmaster without ever sitting still long enough to prove it. It is the shape, not the dial, that carries the call. What you can say about the Speedmaster is that it earned its plainness the hard way. NASA qualified it as the official flight chronograph in 1965 after a run of tests built to destroy it, and four years later it went out onto the lunar surface, which is why people still call it the Moonwatch. It is the rare luxury chronograph designed to be used rather than admired, which is the whole reason a working cop in a fight scene could plausibly be wearing one. The one clear glimpse here is not from a boardroom or a wedding but from a moment of pinning a man against a rack of dead birds, a chronograph built for low Earth orbit doing considerably rougher duty.