I watched the Scott Adkins film Accident Man this week. It's a film for a particular audience, one pre-disposed to enjoy direct-to-video action/martial arts schlock. On that level, it's fairly successful, though limitations of budget and time are apparent in the fight choreo. I'd guess about 10% of the blows are mistimed, or aimed obviously wide. Furthermore, as a showcase for stunt performers, they wisely avoid overly editing the fight sequences, but (presumably in an effort to inject "intensity" without utilizing editing) the camerawork strays occasionally into unmotivated shaky cam territory. It isn't hugely distracting outside of a couple beats though, and, without rapid fire cutting, the action remains mostly legible.
Speaking of stunt performers, the cast is the obvious selling point of the film. Adkins, Michael Jai White, Ray Park, Amy Johnston, and Ray Stevenson are probably the biggest draws for the film's intended audience, and they certainly deliver. While anyone who has seen Black Dynamite knows that Michael Jai White has excellent comedic instincts in addition to his physical prowess, I was pleasantly surprised by Ray Park, who I found to be quite funny as White's partner in crime. Stevenson provides some of his trademark intensity and gravitas, and a handful of other trusty character actors fill out the cast list. Comparatively speaking, Johnston draws the short straw, as her katana-wielding honey pot assassin suffers the most from the movie's early 90s, deliberately edgy, independent comics origins.
With all that being said, the experience is sort of spoiled by the narrative tying the fights together. Adkins is an amoral assassin who views his targets not as people, but as deposits into his bank account. He is misanthropic to the extreme, and it's a testament to Adkins' charisma that I continued to watch after he justifies brutalizing a group of bar patrons (who, to be fair, are depicted as harassing a woman) as necessary to diffuse his "PMT - Post Murder Tension". Tempting though it is to blame Stu Small and Adkins (who debuts as a screenwriter here), as I mentioned, the movie is an adaptation of an early 90s comic by Pat Mills. Mills is most famous for his involvement with the early Judge Dredd stories, so I'm inclined to believe that there's an element of satire in just how edgy everybody is. Much of Adkins' narration appears to be quoted directly from the comics, based on what I was able to find online, so I'd guess that much of what I'm about to criticize the film for is present in the source material and not a reflection of either writer.
The crux of the movie's plot is Adkins' ex-girlfriend (who, after leaving him, began a relationship with another woman) winds up dead, and Adkins sets out to uncover what happened. It's established that Adkins has hang ups about the relationship's end, because she was the only thing in his life that made him feel something. Despite this, it's clear from everyone that he interacts with that she wanted nothing to do with him after they split, and the brief glimpses we get in flashbacks show him to have been utterly uninterested in her as a person, rather than a sex object. Additionally, Adkins discovers that Beth was pregnant with his child at the time of her murder (and that Beth and her new girlfriend, Charlie, intended to raise the child as their own), which he immediately gloms onto in exactly the sort of toxic, possessive masculinity that you might expect from the shittiest kinds of men. To the movie's credit, there are a number of scenes in which Adkins' personal "stake" in the plot is criticized by the less sociopathic characters. Unfortunately, it doesn't fully commit to the bit, and there's a third act pep talk from Charlie to Adkins that feels ridiculously unearned given their history. Additionally, it doesn't sit right with me that Adkins is continuing to use misogynistic language pretty liberally during the final fight, when he's supposed to have experienced some character development on that front.
Also, as a minor annoyance, despite the film's title and his assassination gimmick being based around making his hits look like accidents, we really only see that twice, very early in the film. That's kind of a bummer.
All things being equal though, the movie mostly delivered on the promise of its cast, and the narrative issues I have with it aren't so glaring that I couldn't be bothered to watch the interstitial scenes in between showdowns. 3/5 stars.
