Starring Jay Chou and Nicholas Tse. In English and Cantonese with English subtitles. Rated 14A.

This action flick’s main stars—Jay Chou as an international drug cop and Nicholas Tse as his long-lost brother on the flip side of the law—have enough inherent charisma to hold Kenny Tse’s well-used camera. But veteran Hong Kong director Dante Lam (The Beast Stalker), who wrote the threadbare script with two others, has little interest in them as actors. The Viral Factor travels from Jordan to Malaysia and HK—following some baddies intent on spreading a mutant smallpox virus—but it’s all explosions, car chases, firefights, and glowering standoffs, with almost no context to differentiate those events from a thousand other bullets-in-slo-mo movies.

Okay, there’s nothing new about fucking with no foreplay. But Lam insults us by setting up each gun-happy sequence with the characters spitting out extremely basic exposition, often in phonetic English apparently memorized minutes before the shoot. The porn equivalent would be for the pizza-delivery guy to show up ready but then launch into a monotone overview of local fast-food competition, preferably illustrated by epileptic flashbacks, before getting down to his business.

Lin Peng offers a slightly softening presence as a female epidemiologist who just happens to be sitting next to Chou’s character on his way to Kuala Lumpur to recover from possibly mortal wounds he received in the Middle East. More emotion is provided by the cop’s inevitable reunion with the bad bro, which has them first fighting each other and then teaming up against crooked agents who are in on the poxy caper. This leads to an exciting, if bloody, tour of the colourful streets of KL, followed by an even sharper helicopter chase through urban canyons. But once the copters land, the guys start talking again, and you go back to thinking about pizza.

Watch the trailer for The Viral Factor.