Limerculer
A waste of 90 minutes of my life
Stoutor
It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.
Justina
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
Hyomil
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.
LeoXIV
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.
thomas-chia05
if you like Johnnie's movies, this should be among your list remarkably, this movie is shot with only few characters but to an excellent portrayal not much talking with most of expression & meaning conveyed just by eye or facial movement the curiosity & intense is able to get you focus through the entire movie unexpected death scenes much alike to the final destinations fame gives it extra entertainmentit's been quite some time we have enjoyed great hong Kong films since infernal affairs & exiled go watch it (definitely better than vengeance)
changmoh
FRESH from the Toronto International Film Festival 2009, this Johnny To-produced movie has all the marks of an art-house flick. It has no gun play, no martial art duels and not much in terms of fast-paced action. It is, however, thick with tension, intrigue and paranoia.All these will probably work out to a short theatrical run, attended by art film lovers and Johnny To fans."Accident" offers up a 'new' kind of assassins for hire. Led by The Brain (Louis Koo), the four-member hit team choreographs intricate accidents on their targets. Since the deaths will invariably be classified by police as a freak accident ("death by misadventure"), they are off the authorities' radar. Indeed, the Brain is meticulous in his planning and his nameless partners, Uncle (Fung Shui-Fan), Fatty (Lam Suet) and Woman (Michelle Ye) are experts in their own fields.However, when one of the 'accidents' goes terribly wrong, Brain suspects that someone is trying to kill him - and he sets his sights on Fong (Richie Jen), an insurance agent who happens to be on the accident scene.Directed by Cheang Pou-Soi, "Accident" is a highly absorbing and engrossing crime thriller, especially in the first half. Here, we are fascinated by how the 'accidents' are planned and carried out, by the eccentricities of the individual members and, especially, the paranoia of Koo's character. With each sequence, Cheang manages to draw us deeper and deeper into his web of meticulous intrigue that seems to leave nothing to chance.Things start to fall apart in the second half when Cheang transforms the movie into a psychological thriller - with the perpetrator believing that he has become the target. His fear and quest for revenge make him careless (scribbling plans on the ceiling) and callous, suspicious of even his own members. The movie's credibility starts to strain and what could have been a masterpiece is flawed. - By LIM CHANG MOH (limchangmoh.blogspot.com).
