ACCIDENT MAN: HITMAN’S HOLIDAY: 3 STARS. “a bit of mindless fun.”
“Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday,” now on VOD, is a sequel to a movie you probably haven’t seen, but if you enjoy silly action movies, you might want to put your brain in neutral and schedule a double bill.
Mike Fallon, played by Scott Adkins, is a hired killer with an unusual specialty. He makes his murders look like accidents. “It’s a dirty job” he says, “But I’m willing to get my hands bleeding filthy for the right price.”
Known professionally as Accident Man, when we first meet him in “Hitman’s Holiday” he’s on the scene of a rave, making the death of a DJ look like part of the show.
Looking to get out of town for a spell, until things cool down in England, he grabs a fake passport and hightails it to Malta. He loves the weather and the beer, but unfortunately, the good life is interrupted when Accident Man and his partner, Finicky Fred (Perry Benson), a designer of unusual death machines, are kidnapped by Mrs. Zuuzer (Flaminia Cinque), Malta’s top crime boss.
Her offer is a simple one, keep her son Dante (George Fouracres), who has multiple contracts out on his head, alive. If he does, then Fred will also live to see another day. “I’m not a babysitter,” he says. “I’m a professional killer,” but out of loyalty to Fred, he takes the gig.
To keep his end of the bargain, he’ll have to battle five of the world’s top assassins and possibly rekindle a relationship with Big Ray (Ray Stevenson), a former father-figure—“Imagine if the bloody Terminator was your surrogate father.”—who thinks Accident Man owes him a debt.
“Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday” is a bit of low budget fun. A throwback to the kinds of b-action movies that played on the lower half at midnight madness screenings, it feels like either a tribute to or a satire of, Jason Statham movies. I can’t tell which it is. It contains the same kind of action man moves as Statham, but it doesn’t take itself as seriously. And it is not afraid to get gross.
The ultra-violence and stylized shooting owe a debt to not only to Statham, but also to Guy Ritchie and every movie that values hand-to-hand fisticuffs over computer generated mayhem.
The story in “Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday” is paper thin, the characters are caricatures—like the assassin who cannot feel pain—but it’s just colorful enough to be a bit of mindless fun.
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