“Hunt the Wicked” is a dopey, cheesy cop-teams-with-a-robber shoot’em-up, punch’em-down, kick’em-where it hurts thriller from China.

A serious read on it has to note its tale of official corruption, with a mayor secretly running a narcotics empire under the noses of the citizens who elected him with the cops who work for him turning a blind eye.

It features a laughably theatrical version of police work — with in-the-dark cops emptying the over-production-designed office for assault convoys on the merest of hunches, with such onslaughts often turning into ambushes.

The characters are arch archetypes to a one — intrepid “hero” police captain (Miao Xie), the trusted and noble lieutenant (Jing Gu) who crushes on him, the violent thief (Andy On) masterminding a take-down of this drug empire and his deadly and fetching “honey” (Hong Shuang), a sniper, always two steps ahead of the police.

The polluted water of the fictional Wusili City is a subtext here, as we see heroes and villains diving into the brownest effluent imaginable and the lying mayor (Andrew Lin Hoy) even drinking it to brag about how he cleaned the river/bay up.

He vomits afterwards, and makes the aide who suggested the stunt pay for his stupidity.

But taking all this new designer drug, whose kinky chemistry professor inventor (Anson Leung) is nabbed and worse in the opening scene, smuggling drugs in cakes of ice (meant to be fish) and supervillain meeting with his peers via a Bond villain lair Zoom call seriously is an exercise in futility.

The fights are what fans will show up for, and they’re decent if not remotely genre redefining.

But there’s another subtext here that’s pretty easy to pick up on, and that might be unintentional, which makes it all the more entertaining.

These two foes really get in each other’s faces. I mean CLOSE up. Once they’ve established that they aren’t going to kill each other, their clenches take on a homoerotic quality.

The rogueish robber Wei Yun-zhou is always asking Capt. Huang to dinner. “Why don’t you eat with me?” in Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles. As we’ve seen the workaholic captain repeatedly refuse food from his adoring lieutenant, it’s notable that yes he will have a bite, thank you very much.

When Wei Yun-zhou later has him tied up, he slices off a bit of sushi that has the cop eat off his knife blade. Wicked sexy.

That suggests an interesting direction that this dull, formulaic and contrived thriller might have taken, the road from foes to bros to “We have so much in common” and “You have a taste for fine food” and picking out wedding china. Not that they call it that in China.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Andy On, Miao Xie, Jing Gu, Hong Shuang, Andew Lin Hoy

Credits: Directed by Suiqinag Huo, scripted by
Ma Lao. A Well Go USA/HI-YAH! release.

Running time: 1:43