The Accountant (2016)

The Accountant (2016)

Imdb Movie Rating 7.5/10

R | 2h 8min | Action, Crime, Drama

Director: Gavin O'Connor

Writer: Bill Dubuque

Stars: Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons

Christian Wolff is a math savant with more affinity for numbers than people. Behind the cover of a small-town CPA office, he works as a freelance accountant for some of the world's most dangerous criminal organizations. With the Treasury Department's Crime Enforcement Division, run by Ray King, starting to close in, Christian takes on a legitimate client: a state-of-the-art robotics company where an accounting clerk has discovered a discrepancy involving millions of dollars. But as Christian uncooks the books and gets closer to the truth, it is the body count that starts to rise.

Read imdb Review here

Movie Rating ★★★☆☆

More action-packed than you might expect

Ben Affleck impresses as a maths savant in a thriller marred by inconsistencies

“Not less than. Different.” This is the ethos by which a school for autistic kids, seen in book-ending scenes, raises its children to function in the neurotypical world. And it’s a message on which this entertaining but somewhat disingenuous thriller shamelessly piggybacks. The equal opportunities afforded to Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), a high-functioning autistic maths genius, include whiplash martial arts skills and sharpshooting prowess. Clearly it’s easier to sell a film on explosive action sequences than it is to provide an insight into the mindset of an individual on the autistic spectrum.

Director Gavin O’Connor bows to the unwritten rule that every film about a mathematical savant must include at least one scene in which someone scrawls numbers all over a window. More effective is the nerdy bonding moment between Christian, a freelance accounting troubleshooter with a long list of highly dodgy clients and a sideline in murder, and Dana (Anna Kendrick), the lowly assistant who spotted an anomaly in the books of his latest client.

Affleck is rather good in the central role. So buttoned up it’s like he is wearing an emotional straitjacket, his tacit longing to connect with Dana spills out in a brief, excitable spurt of impenetrable data analysis. However the film is plagued by inconsistencies: why is the autistic school so important to Christian when he didn’t actually go there? (his army officer father seemingly preferred to have the autism beaten out of him by an Indonesian martial arts expert). Why would a company with everything to hide hire an accountant who sees everything? And why would JK Simmons’s retiring FBI agent recruit a young federal analyst to investigate Christian without revealing what he already knows about him? Hopefully the inevitable sequel will plug some of the plot holes.

Read full review at The Guardian

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Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆

Ben Affleck's budget Bruce Wayne doesn't add up

The one thing there’s no accounting for in The Accountant is taste. Everything else you’d expect from a middlebrow, disposable vigilante thriller directed by Gavin O’Connor (Warrior, Pride and Glory) and starring Ben Affleck is present, itemised, audited and totted up.

But the one equation it never manages to balance is the one that says making a film about Asperger’s Syndrome being more or less a superpower equals a rip-roaring and completely non-problematic jape.

Affleck plays Christian Wolff, an autistic savant whose career in financial services has brought him into the employ of some of the slimiest mobsters around, and whose books require the full three-Michelin-star treatment. For reasons that don’t really add up – though Christian would no doubt find a way – our hero’s father (Robert C Treveiler), a merciless authoritarian type, decides it’s in the best interests of his disadvantaged son to train him up as a ruthless killer.

Via preposterous flashback, it’s off to martial arts boot camp in Jakarta, where dad pays a monk to beat up his kid, thereby equipping him with the kind of valuable life skills you need to work with people who might drag you into the shadows, rusty crowbar in hand, if you so much as misplace a decimal point.

In the present, with the help of bright-eyed in-house junior accountant Dana (Anna Kendrick), Christian is auditing a medical technology firm that’s lost $61 million down the back of the sofa, and whose chief executive (John Lithgow) may be up to no good. To all intents and purposes this shunts him to the side of the angels for the film’s duration – a move typical of the film’s weaselly reluctance to own its exploitative premise.

Kendrick doesn’t have much to do apart from gaze moonily at this high-functioning hunk, though romance, let alone agency, is out of the question – and before you ask, yes there is a scene in which she marvels at an incomprehensible web of equations that Christian writes on a window.

Meanwhile, a US Treasury agent (JK Simmons) blackmails a younger operative with a less than spotless past (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) into helping unmask Christian – although the arm-twisting here just feels gratuitous, and only serves to thicken the soup of downbeat sourness the film seems most energised while wading through.

If this subplot didn’t feel superfluous enough, it also sets up a sub-subplot involving Simmons’ character’s past history with Christian, which thuds into the film as an untreated breeze block of backstory far too late in the day to make a noticeable difference to anything other than the running time. (A last act reveal, which feels like it came out of a box marked "in emergency break glass for twist", feels the same.)

Christian himself is positioned as a mixture of Jason Bourne and Will Hunting – perhaps Affleck just fancied the chance to be Matt Damon for a bit? – but while Affleck gropes around for an interesting character, Christian is on a rinse-repeat cycle of maths feat then violent showdown, followed by a supposedly humorous impassive response.

In practice, he’s a strip mall Bruce Wayne, right down to the storage unit full of weaponry and black-market artworks that serves as his low-rent Batcave. Given Affleck himself is the incumbent Batman in Warner Bros’ ongoing DC Comics franchise, the likeness eventually becomes a mood-killer: the overriding sense is of a film obliviously ambling around with its flies unzipped.

Read full review at Telegraph

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Movie Rating ★★★☆☆

 Ben Affleck’s new movie is bizarrely bonkers but entertaining  

THIS film is nuts. I went in expecting a mix between A Beautiful Mind and some John Grisham thing.

I was not prepared for an autistic, kung-fu superhero.

WTF is going on and why does it work better than it should?

Ben Affleck is Christian Wolff, a genius accountant who spends his time un-cooking the books for dodgy criminals.

He’s also into self-torture and, thanks to his martial arts skills – absolutely nails this art.

Hot on his heels are a bunch of government officials, keen to identify and arrest him.

In order to deflect some of the heat, Wollf (on the advice of the mysterious ‘Voice’) takes on a supposed ‘clean’ client – a huge conglomerate who are convinced millions of dollars are being syphoned off.

Which carries a whole set of new problems.

There are plenty of funny moments, some great set pieces and the relationship between Affleck and Kendrick (his kind-of assistant) is fun and refreshing (they don’t bonk).

You're never quite sure what kind of film you’re watching - at times funny, other times brutally violent - but actually, it’s pretty entertaining.

Read full review at The Sun

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Ben Affleck's 'The Accountant' Fails To Add Up

I’ve spent years complaining about the notion of Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne, which once represented a “new” and “of his time” variation on James Bond-ish action heroics, returning to the silver screen precisely because he was an established character. So credit where credit is due. I’m not going to argue too much that Ben Affleck’s Christian Wolff, an autistic accountant for unsavory types who occasionally engages in murderous vigilantism, is necessarily “timely” or “of the moment.” But he is unquestionably a “new” cinematic character in an era of recycled heroes.

To be fair, there isn’t much that is terribly interesting about Affleck’s newest alter-ego aside from the fact that he’s an “on the spectrum” accountant who can kick your butt and likes to shoot bad guys in the head. It certainly presents a sympathetic portrait of Autism/Asperger’s sufferers and their families. Sure, the movie presents said symptoms as a glorified superpower and doesn’t stress that every person on the spectrum is different, but it works on its own terms. For at least the first two acts, Wolff exists in an interesting and engaging narrative.

Alas, this is one of those overly complicated movies that makes less sense as it goes along, over-explaining itself and becoming trapped in a third act that is almost entirely past tense exposition. But for the first 80 minutes or so of this 121-minute (plus credits) thriller, The Accountant is a character-driven potboiler that revels in the virtue of good actors interacting with each other over a potentially interesting story.

Aside from an opening “hook” and references to past carnage, the film is squarely a drama for its first 50 minutes, dividing its time between two compelling narratives. We get Affleck’s plot as well as two U.S. Treasury agents (J.K Simmons and Cynthia Addai-Robinson) attempting to unmask our mysterious anti-hero for reasons that become far more complicated than needed. How those narratives eventually come together, to the extent that they do at all, renders much of the story somewhat pointless. What begins as a stand-alone story ends up feeling more like a backdoor pilot/prologue for a franchise.

The entire story is insanely overcooked. What seems like additional context (flashbacks to Christian’s childhood, Simmons blackmailing Addai-Robinson over her checkered past into helping him, etc.) adds up to nothing or merely complicates what should be precise proceedings. This is one film where the journey is a lot more satisfying than the destination.

We open with Affleck’s protagonist helping an elderly farm couple work around a potentially crippling tax bill, a moment that establishes his general talents and his occasionally altruistic nature. This is important since we quickly learn that he works as an un-cooker-of-books for various sorts of criminals, be they mob bosses, terrorists, or the like. He has a tidy home as well as a mobile fortress of sorts with the means to disappear if need be.

For reasons that eventually don’t make much sense, he decides to accept a gig from a seemingly benevolent robotics company run by John Lithgow. One of their accountants (Anna Kendrick, given shockingly little to do and very little screen time) has discovered something fuzzy with the numbers. Our would-be hero quickly deduces (via an awesome mathematical montage involving the whole “drawing on the windows” thing) that someone in the company is playing “fun with math.”

This all leads to bad people with guns, including an amusing chatty Jon Bernthal, attempting to do bad things. This eventually (if only briefly) turns this film into a “couple on the run” movie. Up to this point, the film makes basic sense. So far, so good. Kendrick is only around for the second act, and her moments of overly eager banter with the very grim and serious Christian do offer a few laughs.

Yes, there are hints of unrequited romance, which makes sense since (13-year age difference notwithstanding) both characters are played by ridiculously good looking actors (Affleck looks like the hottest possible version of Liev Schreiber). But then the film stops in its tracks so that the second narrative strand can catch up to speed. Shockingly, much of the third act is spent painstakingly explaining all of the cryptic hints and would-be connections.

If you loved that third act of Lucky Number Slevin which spent what felt like the last half-hour explaining everything that had come before, you’ll love The Accountant. Still, all of the actors are on-point throughout. Affleck is as good as he needs to be and Kendrick provides a chipmunk charm. Simmons and Addai-Robinson get moments of grounded authority and sharp empathy.

The action is mostly unfussy and efficient, which leads to a certain grim realism to the brutal fisticuffs and many point-blank executions (mostly of bad guys). Director Gavin O’Connor and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey offer a no-frills studio programmer even if Bill Dubuque’s screenplay trips over itself again and again. Fans of Warrior will recognize some of the same themes, although this isn’t anywhere near as satisfying as that cult MMA family drama.

There are any number of enjoyable/quality pieces, but the puzzle doesn’t quite fit together. You will realize by the end how much of the movie, even stuff to be enjoyed at the moment, was superfluous and served to make a simple story seem more complicated. The Accountant is quite entertaining until we realize that it’s going nowhere special.

The numbers don’t add up, but the film almost works purely as a straightforward star-driven thriller in an era when such things are all-too-rare. I’m tempted to recommend the movie merely on account of its first two acts and my hope that a theoretical sequel can dispatch with the table-setting and dive right in with a more straightforward story. I like the idea of The Accountant more than I like the movie that is The Accountant.

Read full review at Forbes

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