Hong Kong action maestro Johnnie To takes his genre filmmaking savvy to the mainland in "Drug War," a nail-biter that's... actually quite light on action but so well-scripted and shot, it's nonetheless edge-of-your-seat material. Co-penned by regular collaborator and fellow Milkyway producer Wai Ka-fai, To's procedural follows a group of Chinese cops who get a busted drug-factory owner to work with them on a complex sting operation in and around Tianjin, China's fourth-largest metropolis.

I do have questions about the way Chinese police conduct operations like this. The members of the unit working this case in the film all seem to come from different places. How does that work? Are they federal police, i.e. Mainland China’s equivalent of DEA or FBI? They work together a little too smoothly and efficiently to be believable as a team quickly cobbled together from different regions. Also, they pull off a massive undercover maneuver in a sprawling port that I can’t imagine going that smoothly. Surely, somebody working on one of those boats would have tipped off the arriving drug dealers that the place was crawling with cops. All I really know about Mainland Chinese police is what I read in The New York Times about how they harass and arrest dissidents, bloggers, poets and petitioners. Never anything about operations like this one.

The acting is generally excellent. I would like to single out actress Huang Yi, who plays Xiao Bei, one of the key members of Zhang’s team, a real no-nonsense type who has to go undercover in some scenes as the flashily-dressed girlfriend of the drug dealer whom Captain Zhang is impersonating. It's not a role the character feels comfortable inhabiting. When she's in full police detective mode, she's awesome. Think a more realistic version of the character Michelle Yeoh played in SUPERCOP. The actress is very good here. I’ve never seen her in anything before. There's another good actress playing the other key female member of the team. I haven't been able to identify her.