One of two Johnnie To films scheduled for release next year, Triad Election/Hak se wui yi wo wai kwai is first showing at the current New York Film Festival. Alternatively titled Harmony Is a Virtue and once known as Election 2 to complete the director/coproducer’s 2005 Election, it seems to be the preference of those who have seen both new works, although the vote here is for the later-opening Exiled.

Actually a number of disparate anti-Manchu Ch’ing secret brotherhoods claiming descent from the seventeenth-century Heaven and Earth, or Triad, Society and sharing ritual and terminology but lacking cohesion or hierarchy, Triads did band together behind Sun Yat-sen in fomenting the 1911 republican revolution but are overwhelmingly infamous for their illegal activity. While Communist crackdown forced a sublimation of such activities on the mainland, noted To during his press conference, the Society remained formidable in Crown Colony Hong Kong, where in the 1960s police estimates pegged one of every twelve inhabitants as involved in gangsterism.

Speaking charmingly in Cantonese just as if the audience would understand even before translation, To said that his purpose had been to document the final glory days of the Triads as they, like the Colony, went through the anxious uncertainty of transition as Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region within the People’s Republic. (Prominent film people like John Woo up and emigrated.) The concrete inspiration came fifteen years ago, in a Chinese higher-up’s insistence that “even gangsters can find a way to serve their country.” Two years’ historical research unearthed an abundance of material -- re-enacted opening-credit ceremonies were even overseen by actual Triads -- though “a narrative film needs to tell a story,” so in the end only “about ten percent” is fact, including the biannual elections and sometimes deadly lobbying for Wo Sung presidency. (For unity, every sect or “family” is Wo.)

The plot is one complicated sucker job, with Beijing’s goal the establishment of successful young businessman Jimmy Lee (Louis Koo) as Triad capo, to coincide with the government’s control of him, an end which will hold crime within acceptable limits and assure peace, stability and prosperity in international cash cow Hong Kong.

M.B.A. Jimmy handshakes a lucrative official highway deal, is cautioned by silent partner Mr. Kwok to “make sure your Triad post doesn’t hurt our business,” and climbs a steep uprise with his innocent wife to indicate where he wants their three-storey house, two of whose floors will be for future children, doctors and lawyers every one. The rest is mostly interiors, to circle back at the end to this green hill and the hero’s realization of his entrapment.

As usual in the director’s work, action dominates characters, who are unnamed or else introduced once in passing and so are hard to keep track of: assassin Jet (Nick Cheung) whines that, despite his years as a hit man “no one knows my name.” It is the birthday of current godfather Lok (Simon Yam), nearing the end of his elected term, which tradition forbids being renewed. Nevertheless seeking an additional two years, Lok kills revered ex-head Uncle Teng (Wong Tim Lam) and plans to undermine, blackmail or kill front-running rival Jimmy.

The latter was the first choice of Teng, of some other voters and, clandestinely, of Xi, Black Ren (Yau Yung), the Chinese Security Bureau Chief who dangles a carrot in possible renewal of the mainland’s blind eye to Jimmy’s pirate CD and DVD sales. (In his remarks, To admitted that piracy has waned, anyway, because of downloading.) Both candidates escalate the violence -- about two-thirds of which was edited out -- beyond a scorecard’s ability to keep count.

To maintain his honor -- a term To dismissed as “not really what it’s about, it’s about money” -- Jimmy directs the sack-drowning of his supposed snitch friend Lik (Andy On). He also contracts mercenary stone killer Bo (Mark Cheng), whose “only love is cash, one penny less and you’re dead.” What disturbs is suave poker-faced Jimmy’s two unprepared-for egregiously brutal acts -- the business with bespectacled Lik, and the dismemberment, castration and dog-food grinding up of a goon, an act so disgusting one accomplice vomits and even Bo is shaken.

Don Michael Corleone may also lash into unexpected violence but is an arresting study in such a complex context that, if not sympathetic, he at least remains interesting. Jimmy, in contrast, is cold or shallow or both, unredeemed by any loyalty or the couple appearances of the wife who too late reveals she is in the family way, whereas even nasty Lok is humanized by concern for wayward adolescent son Denny Lin.

An admirer of Coppola, To did stress, however, that Triad Election is about Hong Kong, not American-Italian, traditions, and that any similarities are to be found in characters’ doing whatever it takes to survive and, to that end, instilling fear in others. But the piling of set pieces hard and fast upon set pieces, none of them anything new, creates vignettes without depth, so the end irony is neither redemptive nor affecting.

(Released by Tartan USA; not rated by MPAA.)