Bosco Lam's directorial trip down the roughly cobbled lane of Hong Kong B-movies has had a few notable entries, such as Underground Banker, but most of them have been clunkers like 1999's Never Compromise. From beginning to end, this is low-budget film-making at its' lowest zenith, simultaneously boring the audience and squandering the talents of most everyone involved in the production, especially Francis Ng and Yu Rong-Guang.

Never Compromise starts out promisingly enough, with a pair of Hong Kong thugs, Bill and Shing (Francis Ng and Simon Lui) executing a house full of people in the Mainland province of Guangdong. This leads to the hot-headed cops Tung and Cheung (Yu Rong-Guang and Cheung Shui-Chit) leading an investigation to bring justice to the criminals by any means necessary.

Sounds like a good setup, doesn't it? Well, not so fast. Bosco Lam (who also co-wrote the screenplay) struggles to fill out the scant eighty-two minute running time, devoting a lot of effort to flashback scenes that really add nothing to the movie besides the unintentional hilarity of seeing Ng and Lui in some ridiculous-looking wigs.

In a little defense of Lam, Never Compromise seems to be a movie that was, at least in part, aimed at a Mainland audience, which means it does not subscribe to many of the mores (i.e., the enjoyable over-the-top "naughty" bits) of your usual Hong Kong gangster shenanigans, and you're also going to get a healthy dose of pro-Mainland undertones.

From the version watched for this review, the Mei Ah DVD, it appears that there were some hard edits for violence. The appearance of an awkwardly-worded title card at the end that discounts the scene just witnessed, where one of the criminals is shot while in custody, instead purporting that they were put to death after a trial, further indicates that there was some after-market tweaking going on that Lam did not have a hand in.

In the end, though, no matter what sort of producer "input" or censorship Lam had to face, he still didn't end up creating anything that's compelling, interesting, or exciting. Usually Hong Kong film-makers can do these sorts of crime dramas in their sleep and ultimately come up with something that offers at least a modicum of cinematic value to the potential viewer, whether it's oodles of inventively-shed claret, a unique story, or an outstanding performance. Never Compromise brings forth none of these elements, or really anything beyond a low-budget director at his most lackadaisical setting up a camera in the middle of nowhere and expecting something of interest to pop up.

RATING: 3