Accident Man (2018)

Accident Man arrives from 2018 with its comic-strip pedigree intact, a Pat Mills and Tony Skinner creation handed to Scott Adkins, who co-wrote, produced, and stars as a killer who stages his murders as mishaps. It is a brisk, jokey business. The cast is largely white and British, with Michael Jai White in support and an Indian actor cast as the villainous oil magnate, arrangements that reflect ordinary genre habit and nothing more pointed. A same-sex relationship exists in the margins, Beth's girlfriend Charlie, present as a plot mechanism for exposition and one argument in an apartment. Women fight well here, Jane the Ripper with her katana, Charlie with her fists, and the film grants them competence without a single thought about what any of it might mean.

The engine of the revenge, such as it is, runs on environmentalism. Beth was an activist, she had gathered material on Pankot Petroleum, and that file gets her killed. The film thus carries an eco-crusade in its chassis, though it never stops to preach about it. Corporate corruption supplies the conspiracy, and the antagonist is a tycoon who offers a bribe and loses his head for it. This is stock villainy dressed in a suit, the kind of thing action cinema has done since the 1980s, and it lands closer to catharsis than to economics. The villain's ethnicity sits uneasily, a crooked foreign magnate in a film with no interest in race as a subject, which is its own kind of accidental statement.

What the film lacks is any appetite for instruction. There is no body-image discourse, no neurodivergent character, no revisionist history, no sermon. The punches and the gags arrive in tandem, as one critic observed, and the audience is trusted to enjoy them without being told what to think. For a genre picture adapted from a comic, that restraint is nearly quaint. It kills, it quips, it decapitates an oil executive, and it leaves the classroom empty.