``The Replacement Killers'' is all style. It's a high-gloss version of a Hong Kong action picture, made in America but observing the exuberance of a genre where surfaces are everything. The characters are as flat as figures on a billboard, but look at the way everything is filmed in saturated color, and anything that moves makes a metallic whooshing sound that ends in a musical chord, and how when the hero walks down a corridor at a car wash, it's done with a tilt and a zoom. In a movie like this, the story is simply a device to help us tell the beginning from the end. The film is the American debut for Chow Yun-Fat, a popular star in Asia for 20 years and for the last 10 a frequent collaborator with John Woo, the Hong Kong action wizard also now working in Hollywood (he produced this film). Chow is good-looking, open-faced, with a hint of sadness that reminded me of Charles Bronson in repose. Here he plays John Lee, a Chinese immigrant to America, who owes a favor to the druglord Terence Wei (Kenneth Tsang). Wei's son has been killed by a cop (Michael Rooker).

Lee's assignment: kill someone important to the cop. But with the target framed in his telescopic sights, Lee just can't do it. ``I went against Mr. Wei,'' he tells a wise Buddhist monk. ``There will be consequences.'' He knows Wei will go after his mother and sister in Shanghai, and he needs a forged passport to fly home and protect them. That leads him to the lair of Meg Coburn (Mira Sorvino), a master forger whose first appearance is a good example of the movie's visual lushness: Leaning over her computer, she's in red lipstick and a low-cut dress, in a hideaway that looks like a cross between skid row and a cosmetics ad. Meg is a tough girl, played by Sorvino with a nice flat edge (while Lee's posing for his passport picture, she says, ``Smile, and say `flight from prosecution.' ''). She wants no part of his troubles, but soon they've teamed up as Wei throws squadrons of killers at them, including two ``replacements'' flown in to complete the job Lee reneged on.

In movies such as this, everyone knows everyone. Chow and Sorvino go into an amusement arcade, and she's hit on by a gold-toothed creep. Her reaction: ``I try to stick to my own species.'' The creep, of course, is in the hire of Wei, and soon a gun battle rages through the arcade. Other elaborately choreographed shoot-outs take place in a car wash, and in a theater where the cop has taken his son for a cartoon festival (the gunfire is intercut with Mr. Magoo).

There's a moment in the recent ``Desperate Measures'' where violence erupts as a father tries to save the life of his son, and a cop asks, ``How many people are gonna have to die here tonight so that kid of yours can live?'' I had the same thought in ``Replacement Killers.'' Because Chow spares Wei's target, approximately two dozen people die, or maybe more (in the dark it's hard to see what happens to all the Magoo fans).

What I liked about the film was its simplicity of form and its richness of visuals. There's a certain impersonality about the story; Chow and Sorvino don't have long chats between the gunfire. They're in a ballet of Hong Kong action imagery: bodies rolling out of gunshot range, faces frozen in fear, guys toppling off fire escapes, grim lips, the fetishism of firearms, cars shot to pieces, cops that make ``Dragnet'' sound talky. The first-time director, Antoine Fuqua, is a veteran of commercials and music videos; with cinematographer Peter Lyons Collister, he gets a sensuous texture onto the screen that makes you feel the roughness of walls, the clamminess of skin, the coldness of guns.

``The Replacement Killers'' is as abstract as a jazz instrumental, and as cool and self-assured.