Accident (Soi Cheang, 2009): Hong Kong

Reviewed by Gillian Weiner. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

The film “Accident” is about a crew that stages hits that are supposed to look like accidents but are really pre staged killing traps. The crew of four does their job well until one of their stagings goes a wrong and ends up killing one of the members. Brain (Louis Koo), the leader of the crew, is convinced that someone who was plotting to kill him and his team choreographed the accident. He becomes paranoid and stops being able to tell the difference between his own reality and his own delusion. Once Brain convinces himself that a certain insurance agent who was at the scene of the “accident” he obsesses about the idea that Fong, the agent, must be the man behind the plan wanting to take down him and his team. The only thing that will make Brain sleep at night is knowing that Fong is dead before he’s able to make his next move which could be killing Brain.

When I read the synopsis I was intrigued and really excited to see a Hong Kong film shoot such a plot line. However, it was not very well executed. This film was added after the festival started so I expected it to be compelling and really well done. It wasn’t that compelling and it was hard to follow. When a movie is hard to follow the viewer just gives up after a while, that’s exactly what I did. The beginning of the film was interesting to watch. It started out with someone falling into the killing trap that Brain’s crew put together. It’s really intricate and well done. After the climax it all goes down hill more or less. A lot of the story didn’t make sense because it wasn’t told properly. It focused on things that were irrelevant and didn’t help the conciseness of telling the narrative.

The ending I saw coming, which wrapped up the movie in utter disappointment. Brain was too over the top and not a good protagonist to follow throughout the whole movie. I wanted to see more of the crew work together instead of seeing them gets killed one by one. The sound effects were cheesy and some of the time didn’t make much sense. I found myself turning to the friend I was sitting next to and saying: “what?” He agreed with my question every time.

I felt really left down. I had high hopes in the beginning but in the end it didn’t deliver. It’s like the director was in a big hurry to finish the film so in post he rushed the editing to where key elements were left out. The plot could have been really interesting, half way through I wondered what the movie would be like if the United States did it with a bigger budget. Maybe we’ll see that in the future.