Yi ngoi (2009)

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.