Giovanni Cassanese If every effect is the son of the cause and every cause is simply the inescapable track towards it, then what is an accident? Is there really a possibility that the events in this world can move without direction, without any puppeteer, at no charge? Brain does not believe in chance. His wife died in a car accident with no apparent responsible and to believe in coincidences would mean to give up any why. Uncle, Fatman and Woman are other accomplices (no other specific name will be given) with which the brain, for a fee, plan very complex human models that transmute a murder into what seems nothing more than an accident. When the organization clashes with the unexpected death of Fatman during the staging of a difficult job, then something clicks in Brain, who betrayed his illusion of total control of human events, begins to investigate on the event becoming suspicious of his own friends. Paranoia, revenge and mirror games become the ingredients of the investigation against those who would have sabotaged the puppet theater of which he is a betrayed deus ex machina and will accompany us to a final resolution (that is one of the best things about this movie). Soi Cheang is part of the team of Johnny To and the new Hong Kong cinema. The Chinese city is perpetually shrouded in an aura of inhuman and sometimes sterile suspension. Violence erupts as is, without too much indulgence and without any cutting. The intricate accident sequences are thrilling in their complexity and streaked here and there by a certain poetry. The rain, the neon lights and a solar eclipse dusty become the dominant hue of the photography. We can think Brain not as a criminal, but a sort of artist who paints on a canvas the instruction book of human-robot who thinks he can choose, who thinks things randomly happen to him, who thinks he's really living.Giovanni Cassanese www.kayfa.be

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.

Joe I'm not sure what to make of this movie. It's not a long film, and so repeat viewings may make people appreciate its intricacies more. The film revolves around a small tight-knit group of assassins who work by killing their victims in ways that would appear to have been purely an accident, the "accident" being decidedly gruesome once executed.Led diligently by a straight-forward highly intelligent man they call "Brains", they work to ensure no trace can lead the deaths to themselves. When the tables are turned and a member is killed, the focus closes on "Brain" who struggles to find out what has happened and gone wrong, and who is out to get them.It's a moody film and uses the claustrophobic HK atmosphere well. One problem is that it's hard to decipher all that is happening from one viewing. It can get ponderous and confusing. The acting is generally very good and the action of the deaths very well done, but it doesn't compensate for the lack of clarity. Then again maybe it wasn't meant to be a tidy film and that is the point.Overall, I thought it was okay and interesting enough. Maybe with some more work and time on the script then it could have become far better. Not bad, but just not great.

DICK STEEL 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.