One should hope they never find themselves at the business end of an assassin. Especially not any of the assassins from Accident Man (2018) seeing as how they all possess unique and brutal ways of killing people. There’s Jane the Ripper (Amy Johnston), who rips through people with her katana, Carnage Cliff (Ross O’Hennessy), who cleaves carnage with his mighty axe, and our hero, Mike (Scott Adkins), the Accident Man because he makes his kills look like accidents.
Mike’s had a good run as a hitman. When you can kill people without creating any lasting questions or in-depth investigations, it makes it really easy to get away with murder. It’s when Mike starts breaking the hitman society rules, “Don’t get involved,” he gets into trouble. When Beth (Brooke Johnston) enters the picture it revitalizes a small section of the Accident Man’s cold, dead heart. They break up but then, when Beth’s environmental activism crosses the wrong people, she ends up getting her once warm, alive heart devitalized by one of Mike’s fellow assassins. He ditches his all-business approach to work and gets personal to find out who killed his ex-girlfriend so he can enact his no-so-accidental revenge. The hitmen society leader, Big Ray (Ray Stevenson), calls for all hands on deck to make the Accident Man look like an accident. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t go well for them.
Accident Man is a stunt performer’s movie. Both cast and crew are primarily stunt performers, so they came at this project with incredible enthusiasm and skills you won’t find anywhere else.
The many mano y mano fight scenes use long shots to give the action time to breathe, eschewing modern Hollywood’s overreliance on quick cuts for the sake of ease. There’s a fight scene between Adkins, Michael “Black Dynamite” Jai White and Ray “Darth Maul” Park that’s a beautifully-choreographed dance of face-pounding with three performers whose years of experience and passion shine with every blocked blow or punched punum. Amy Johnston also gets her time to shine in a fight with Mike.
Voiceover can be a tricky addition, but here it helps a lot as Mike is, on paper, kind of a dickhead. He really tows the line between likability and backpfeifengesicht, but his narration gives us a bit of his cheeky sense of humor and occasional glimpse of humanity that helps you like him enough to let all the irritating slurs and disrespectful comments about women slide by like a greased pig wearing a top hat- gone but certainly not forgotten.
Despite Accident Man being about assassins-on-assassin combat, there is a surprising amount of non-action- and the less time we spend with Mike talking to other characters, the better. There is also one very… very odd addition to the film I really have to highlight. Near the very end of the film, a character gets decapitated… and then his decapitated body lets out an audible farting sound as it gushes blood. Like we’re talking an early ‘00s Cartoon Network carton kind of fart, impossible to miss. Yes, it’s funny, yes I laughed, and yes I did rewind it a few times to make sure it really happened. It takes a lot to surprise this Action Chick, so big props to Accident Man for homing in on something I’ve never seen before!
Action Rating: 3.5 Farting Headless Guys, out of 5
Disclaimer: Just because I am the Action Flick Chick and love action movies does not mean I condone real life violence in any way. Everyone has their own shit to deal with, be nice to each other.
