Tartan's US version of Divergence

I went to the movies this afternoon and hung out with my friend Wilson C for a few hours.  I'm flying back to HK tomorrow morning, so I'll probably wait til I'm on the plane to write up my film review... but in the meanwhile here's something I spotted at Rasputin's in Berkeley that I wanted to discuss...

Let me back up and start from the top - In case you're not familiar, in 2005, Daniel Wu did a film called  ' Divergence' costarring Aaron Kwok and Ekin Cheng.  Three big names each playing a lead character.  Aaron is a cop,  Dan is an assassin and Ekin is a lawyer (working for a gangster if I remember correctly).

I saw the movie in the theater on opening day because I happened to be visiting HK that week, it was ok, not the greatest work of any of the actors or Benny Chan, the director.  The HK promo posters and DVD looked like this::

A few months later when I was in Tokyo for a conference I happened upon a Japanese version of the poster (i think it had a limited Tokyo run only), it looked like this:

Japanese title is pronounced 'Dibajyensu'

So today when I saw the version they were selling in the US, I was a bit confused:

o-kay... a bit different, wouldn't you say?

.. so how many things are misleading in this cover?

1) Dan's part is actually much smaller than the other two guys, why is he in front, 2 or 3 times bigger than everyone else and holding a pistol?  and where is his little mustache thing?

2) As near as I can remember,  Dan's character never wears a suit and tie...

3) The film didn't win 4 'hong kong academy awards' (it won a HKFAand 3 Taiwan Golden Horse awards)

4) Any resemblance to 'Infernal Affairs' is limited to the fact that both movies contain Chinese people, some of which are police officers, some of which are not and sometimes they shoot guns.

The back cover was even weirder :

as near as i can see Aaron (the actual biggest part in the movie) doesn't appear on the back,  except for that one image of Ekin's head,  all the pictures on the back are of Daniel Wu's assassin character and the girl who played his horny, double-crossing girlfriend... 

the quotes are horribly inaccurate too - 'Divergence Takes off and NEVER SLOWS DOWN'and 'Keeps things moving with STRIKING VELOCITY'...  incredibly ironic because one of the major complaints most people have about the movie (like here) is that it only has like one big action scene in the middle, and is rather bogged down in overly complex story the rest of the way through,  I think its safe to say it loses some of its striking velocity in the extended scene where Aaron sits in his car and cries while eating a Filet O Fish sandwich from McDonald's.... 

And this picture is just weird:

I dunno where they got that picture from its not in the movie either...  but the bigger question is why on earth would they put it on the DVD cover?

i wonder why it is these companies will put the money down to buy the distribution rights for a foreign film and then not spend the time or effort to do a decent job with the packaging and promotion?  (or why they feel the need to replace the original promo material with half-ass generic crappola?)  -- this is not that much better than what you see on those crappy photoshopped bootlegs in China...