Two young women, traveling toward a music festival near Lake Tahoe on a lonely stretch of isolated Californian road, hitch a ride with a pair of seemingly harmless guys with a fast, expensive car. Their elated joyride goes south when the car flips over during a torrential downpour and crashes near the edge of a lake adjacent cliff, but this isn’t just any car these kids have completely wrecked. The car is stolen and belongs to a powerful criminal kingpin hellbent on getting the car back in his malefactor grips. With being pinned under the upside down car, sustaining serious injuries, and being accomplices to grand theft auto of a wired traced car, the odds of survival are slim and time is running out as henchmen move into retrieval mode to track down the stolen car and kill anyone they come across involved.

“Cheeseburgers and Ryan Gosling.” That direct quote fairly sums up the Dan Tondowski written and director action thriller titled unambiguously as “Accident.” The 2017 feature is Tondowski’s debut feature film; in fact, it’s his own credited feature film that embraces, or maybe just mirrors, the action sequenced camerawork of Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov, director of “Wanted” and “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Killer.” Tondowski begins his film impressively enough with a long take, nearly 7 minutes, of setting up the two women, Jess and Caroline, into their catalytic moment that forces into hitchhiking. After that, “Accident” becomes strictly popcorn cinema on a downward slop of insufferable filmmaking that maintains an afloat affliction with moderately entertaining special effects that include a slow motion car crash, an intense helicopter crash, and a 50 caliber machine gun.

Each and every single character in “Accident” was written without an ounce of redeeming value and Stephanie Schildknecht (“Death Race 2”) and Roxane Hayward (“Death Race: Inferno”), who were Jess and Caroline in the film, couldn’t rile up a brief moment why the plight bestowed upon them should have not have happened to them. The suspicion of how Schildknecht and Hayward received their roles might be due to the fact that they both look damn good in a bikini and black lingerie, featured when they strip to the said garments in a gas station bathroom during an back and forth dialogue. Don’t know why they removed their clothes, but that was certainly an aesthetic highlight. Tyrone Keogh (“Death Race 2” – if you haven’t noticed, three out of the four main stars have been in “Death Race” sequels) and Keenan Arrison portray the two car thieves, Fred and Thomas, who pick up Jess and Caroline to have everything they need, fast car and beautiful girls, so Fred states.

While the production value for “Accident” is top notch and ultra-glossy, that’s roughly the sole positive aspect of the film. The script by Dan Tondowski is a wild hose of loose-to-absent plots and subplots chased with misplaced dramatics and cringe worthy dialogue, the latter already stated earlier with the “cheeseburger and Ryan Gosling” line in the context of being the very one thing a person would want on the brink of death. The overall script as a whole is terribly superficial without much substance to care why these four joyriders should be saved from the pain that’s barreling their way and the answer to that is there is no recourse for any of the characters; no one single redeeming value is actioned or given in exposition to rejuvenate them to a higher standing. Jess is wish-washy with her life choices and a patsy to Caroline, Caroline deceives her mother and neglects her friendship with Jess, Fred wishes everyone dead to save his own butt, and Fred is a potential rapist with pivoting change of heart. Neither of them have self-respect and so when they’re thrown violently into a mix of blood and bullets, an agonizing amount of wait time goes by until their ultimate demise. The plot dissolves around the importance of the car and it’s connection to the great threat that descends upon the four naïve adolescents. At one point in post-crash, the carjackers find a suitcase thrown from the vehicle and they dig through it to only find clothing. The scene is awkwardly out of place and fizzled after the initial “AH-HA” interest that might have shed some light on what the hell was going on.

Exclusively on digital come April 3rd, Well Go USA is releasing Dan Tondowski’s action-thriller “Accident.” The feature-film will be not rated and have a runtime of 89 minutes. The image and audio quality will not be critique for this review due to the digital platform that varies in qualities and no bonus features were included with the digital screener. In closing, “Accident” crashed and burned after the nice 7-minute single take that dapples of nice imagery from then on out and figures to quickly run through the digital market, but with the Tondowski’s cinematography, I expect the filmmaker to only get better from here.