This film is underrated. Oh well, not every movie can be made by Marvel.This film is about a professional hit-man and his team of self-styled "accident choreographers", who kill their victims by trapping them in well crafted "accidents" that look like unfortunate mishaps but are in fact perfectly staged acts of murder. He is consistently plagued by guilt, and the memories of his recently lost wife don't make things any easier. Even worse, one of his team members dies in an apparent "accident", which forces him to stay one step ahead of their competition.One important thing that you need to understand about "Accident" is that it's a non-stop exhibition of paranoia because the scriptwriting is first-class as it straddles the line between chance and intent through a number of events that may signify an orchestrated murder by another party. The way this works is that some events are immediately shown to be acts of human intent – for example, the opening scene is clearly shown to be a murder that is made to look like an accident – but other events are left ambiguous, and you're not sure if it's an act of human intent or a moment of coincidence (or chance). So you're placed in the same situation as the protagonist because he's also not sure. And that's really the foundation of the entire movie, and it's a solid foundation to stand on.It may be a surprise to you that the story moves slowly, but this could be considered a positive because it allows the paranoia to take center stage and it focuses a lot on developing the main character. The entire film revolves around this guy, making this just as much of a character piece as it is a series of suspense sequences. With that said, the "accidents" themselves are very cool and the direction is top notch. This was actually directed by Pou-Soi Cheang, and "Accident" was his best film in his filmography up to this point – representing an improvement over his previous titles. And I still think this is his best work, despite the fact that he has given us some very entertaining stuff between 2009 and the present day (such as "SPL 2: A Time for Consequences", "The Monkey King 2", and "Motorway").The lead actor is Louis Koo, who earlier in his career appeared in a bunch of the "Troublesome Night" movies. Most fortunately, his roles subsequent to that franchise were far more reliable and entertaining. He's definitely an actor whose filmography is worth exploring because he's been in a lot of good movies. "Accident" is one of them, and I really liked his performance in this. It's a bit on the eccentric and gloomy side, but that's important for his character.I definitely recommend "Accident", which is one of the better slow-burn suspense thrillers in recent memory. It is widely available on DVD, so be sure to check this one out.

Accident's trailer gives a promising setup of a thriller focused on a team of assassins who make their killings look like accidents, but there's no follow through. Thrilling this is not, especially when you start to get into the grind of just how many niggling details have to be accounted for to make a death believable as an accident and how many things have to come together in the right way and at the right time or the whole thing has to be called off and back to the drawing board.The movie might at least be intellectually interesting, but nothing is particularly believable or smart (the film is only capable of telling us Louis Koo's character is a genius rather than showing us) and there's minimal plot, dialog, or character interaction. Questions that should be asked aren't. Questions that no one really cares about are lingered on too long. Louis Koo plays the main character, Brain, dominating the screen time, and the disappearance of each of the other capable actors, none of whom are around for long, is keenly felt. I've seen Koo give some fine performances, but here he must spend most of the movie alone and silent, with no one to play off of, which is a tall order for any actor, even if they have a stellar script, which Accident most certainly does not. The silence also conveniently leaves out the need for the film to flesh out Brain's theories and what he's thinking and we're just left to guess--perhaps the director thought this would be a clever style because it would put the audience in the same mindset as the main character, but it just put me in the mindset of wanting to go to sleep.With the main character being a stony hired killer, there's no one to root for, and it doesn't take too many lingering shots of Brain furrowing his brow to convey the wheels of his genius brain are turning while conducting surveillance of mundane events until you stop caring. Slogging through to the ending adds little, so you might as well just move on when the boredom gets intense. There's really not any "twist" at the end that redeems things, as some reviewers try to make out; I don't know if the film's creators really even intended there to be. If you're "blown away" by the ending, either you haven't seen many movies of this sort, or you should probably consider yourself a pretty thick.Accident is just another triumph of atmosphere over substance that relies on cheap tricks to bypass viewers' ability to think critically about the weaknesses of the script by implying things that never materialize and various other manipulations that leave you feeling used at the end when it becomes apparent that the things you had to forgive in the hope that this was leading somewhere have led nowhere worth going. Overheard (2009), also with Koo (and Ching Wan Lau and Daniel Wu), comes to mind as an example of a better surveillance-themed movie.

I saw this movie at the Helsinki International Film Festival, more lovingly known as Love and Anarchy. The festival often caters to Johnnie To/Milkyway fans and this year we were "treated" to Accident.This review contains major spoilers, so if you are interested in the film, I would suggest skipping this review. In short, i think this movie contains a near perfect story, but one of the worst scripts ever.The story involves a group of contract killers that evade suspicion by staging elaborate murders that look like ACCIDENTS (Great premise). The group consists of four members: brain, fatty, uncle and an unnamed girl (Got to love these aliases, I mean who asks people to call them brain...a prick). The leader brain's wife (probably nicknamed heart, or perhaps the original fatty) died in a car crash which it would seem instigated brains contract killer lifestyle, and he seems to believe that the car crash was no mere ACCIDENT. The group get a contract to kill this innocent looking wheelchair-bound older dude (really uncool, btw). During the hit, something goes wrong and one of the group members gets killed, and brain is convinced this was no ACCIDENT either. Crazy times. This instigates the second part of the film, which focuses on brains operation to find out who set him up, killing his group member, listening to strangers have sex, murdering an innocent girl with the power of the sun, and getting killed himself. And for what? NOTHING! Yup, that's the big realization. Brain was a maniac, paranoid guy that saw figures in the shadows and great big schemes where there were none. Most likely this was his way to cope with the death of his wife, such a horrible act needed some rational reasoning, it could not be just an ACCIDENT. The idea that this guy was doomed by his own imagination and past experiences is just perfect. If this movie was remade by something like a Scorsese/DiCaprio collaboration they could really make something great. As it is....it's really bad. REALLY BAD.You see the problem is that nearly every scene is unrealistic and thus unbelievable, and furthermore no character acts even semi-rationally, which makes the movie unconvincing and the characters meaningless. They are simply devices to advance an incredibly stupid script. OK, so brain is this intellectual mastermind that can orchestrate these insane domino effects, right? Then how is it, that he can't notice that one of his four members is clearly suffering from severe dementia. I mean so severe that he is popping pills at the rate of Tic Tacs. And the director makes the point of showing that brain is so careful not to leave any traces, paying with coins from a cloth and changing modes of transportation to loose any potential tails. Yet, still the guy is always right next to the murders, doesn't use gloves and leaves prints everywhere, makes the money drops in a parking lot with cameras (why?), the point being that clearly the character and script have not been developed very far. The best example of this are the murders. They are just too much based on chance. The first murder is just silly, the idea being that in the end there is a fallen banner that covers one fifth of the marks windshield, and for some reason instead of just driving past, he gets out and pulls the banner down, which results in a window breaking and the glass killing him. The one that just made everyone in the theater laugh was a murder that used a wet cord from a kite to transmit an electronic shock to the wheelchair-bound dude. I mean the idea that someone could predict how a kite would fly in a storm and where it would land is seriously idiotic. Anyway.The other major issue is that this group is not sympathetic. They are contract killers with no redeeming features. From an ethical point, there is no reason for the audience to root for them, and the lack of a clear enemy through out most of the movie takes a lot of the potential tension away.So all in all, the potential is there and I must say that I personally enjoyed watching the movie, just because it was so silly and unapologetic in its stupidity (the eclipse at the end, and that road sign...), so in a way this movie would rate 1 star based on script and 10 based on premise, hence the rating of 5.

You know how it is when you cry wolf too much, or are one of those pranksters who ultimately falls for a trick just because of you didn't believe it can happen to you. Accident plays along similar lines, and director Soi Cheang's latest film is an excellent atmospheric piece that adds to Milkyway's repertoire of tautly crafted contemporary crime thrillers.Accident introduces a bunch of hit men who bump their marks off very differently. They are not hardened criminals who are on the radar of the cops, but operate in such stealthy fashion, from obtaining their contracts, right down to execution (pardon the pun) and retrieval of payment dues. The movie boasts two of such finely designed set action pieces sans guns ablazing, but full of meticulously planned cunning (in what is staple in heist films) carried out to a T, where death gets delivered to victims and made to look like freak acts of god, which of course takes a wee bit of stretching of the imagination since some bits do rely on coincidences to ensure a perfect degree of success.The trouble amongst this group lies with the leader Brain (Louis Koo), whose crew consisting of Uncle (a welcome to see Feng Tsui-Fan back to the big screen), Fatty (a role that Milkyway evergreen regular Lam Suet owns), and a beautiful but unnamed woman (Michelle Ye), feel a little stifled given Brain's suspicious and paranoia nature. In what Brain preaches as Trust amongst his crew, it is actually trust that he personally doesn't embody, with frequent taps on his gang to ensure that they toe the line. The reason why Brain would choose a life as such was suggested in the prologue, which adds some emotional weight to the deliberate deadpan of the character, one conscientiously living off the grid, with no bank account, and no Octopus card too for public transport, preferring to use cash and not leave a paper trail.It's the second half of the film that intrigued a lot more, as we're drawn into Brain's suspicious world from the time the second action sequence didn't go as planned, and went horribly awry. Refusing to believe in chance encounters since there are others in the business, and that their earlier victim had been a triad boss, we're thrusts into a web of possibilities to the chain of events that follow, which involves an insurance worker played by Richie Jen in what would be nothing more than a glorified cameo. You'll start to question whether Brain's set up from the inside (ala Brian De Palma's Mission Impossible), or is outwitted by Jen's character, or just drowning into his own delusions where his paranoia finally caught up with him.And this became translated into the Louis Koo show. Of late he has been starring in a number of noteworthy roles, but his character here really took the cake. A friend of mine had commented that Lau Ching Wan would find the Brain character right up his alley, but I thought Koo did well enough in this role that involved minimal dialogue, of a quiet man on a warpath utilizing his trade to find some meaning in debunking that thing called Chance. I suppose you can also call it an occupational hazard of sorts.The mood of the film will really get to you, with rain soaked sequences, moments of aloofness and loneliness (kinda like an art film at times too) and unflinching scenes of violence, with credit also going to the soundtrack by Xavier Jamaux, who has also been involved with and contributed to Milkyway productions such as Sparrow and Mad Detective. If you're a fan of the soundtrack from those movies, then you're in for a treat when you watch Accident. Running less than 90 minutes, the finale, or the "Eureka" or moment of realization, is a scene that I'll remember for a long time to come. While it might have been similar to the Deux Ex Machina styled as employed in another Milkyway production in Eye in the Sky, I thought that it played into the themes of Chance, Fate and Karma all rolled into one perfectly shot and designed sequence, that had me at the edge of my seat and wondering how it would all finally play out. And when the answer is so starkly simple, you're left to ponder that you too have already become what Brain symbolized – you have thought too much, and share in the same level of reluctance to believe in anything other than the situation having to be something overly engineered.I would recommend that you give Accident a go in the cinemas, but of course if you're willing to put up with it being dubbed in Mandarin, and censored sex scenes being treated in the same manner as Overheard.