The Accountant Review

The Accountant Review

Have you ever wanted to see a movie that is a combination Rain Man and Jason Bourne? Well here is the movie. The Accountant is an amusing movie that is both awesome but at the time a little confused. It has a really intriguing story and some great performances but suffers from a bit of identity crisis. When you add everything up together you get a movie that is entertaining but flawed. 

The movie is about an accountant named Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) who is an accountant. He suffers from a mild case of autism which allows him to be very fluent with numbers but also makes him very anti-social and unemotional. While he is living in a small-town CPA office, he makes a living by being an accountant for criminal organizations. 

One day Christian takes a robotics company as a client run by Lamar Blackburn (John Lithgow). However, when he discovers that there is an inconsistency with the numbers, which involves millions of dollars, he gets suspicious. As he learns more about what is going on, more people mysterious are killed around Christian are killed. Now Christian needs to find out what is going on while we also learn more about Christian’s past. At the same time the director of financial crimes at the Treasury Department, named Raymond "Ray" King (J. K. Simmons), assigns a young analyst named Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to track down Christian.

The strongest element of this movie to me is the performances. Ben Affleck does an amazing job playing Christian Wolff who is a math genius but is anti-social and unemotional. Throughout the movie Affleck able to play an unemotional genius and then in a second he can transform into someone who is emotionally unstable. 

J. K. Simmons is also great as the head of the Treasury Department, playing a character who has gone through a lot and ready to retire. Anna Kendrick also plays a fellow accountant, named Dana Cummings, who gets interested in Christian Wolff and also gets thrown into the mystery. Jon Bernthal (who you might recognize as The Punisher from the Daredevil Netflix show) also wonderfully plays an assassin and has an interesting connection with Christian Wolff. There are also some great performances from John Lithgow as the head of the robotics company, Cynthia Addai-Robinson as the analyst trying to hunt down Christian Wolff, and Jeffrey Tambor as a friend of Christian Wolff who taught him a lot about working with criminals. 

I also really like the story which is a dark mystery that has many twists in turn. Through Christian Wolff, we see clues of what is going on piling up until we get to the very end in which we learn what is really going on. I even enjoyed the use of flashbacks to show Christian’s past which shows how he became who he his. We see flashbacks of how his dad made him fight through his disability, both literally and figuratively. 

What also stood out was the cinematography. The film has a dark tint to it like a neo-noir which sets the tone of the film. We have the sense that we are in a city full of corruption and violence even with people trying to stop it. 

The action sequences are also some of the highlights of the film. They are shot in style of Jason Bourne, with quick jump cuts showing each hit that the two fighters lay upon each other. Except the fights are much more brutal and more bloody.

However there were some issues with the film. The biggest problem I had was the weird shifts in tone. At some point, it seems like the movie wants to be a fast paced action mystery with the gritty fight scenes involving Christian Wolff beating up bad guys. 

But at the same time, the film also seems like the director wants the film to be a disability empowerment fantasy with a message about fight through disability. At the beginning of the film, we see a young Christian Wolff trying put together a puzzle and then we find out it is a puzzle of Muhammad Ali. I think the director is trying to symbolize how Christian is fighting through his disability. I honestly feel that the grounded and fanciful tones really do not match.

There are also moments in the first half of the movie in which the pace of the film slows down and drags. Many scenes have characters going through exposition in very monotone voices way longer then they should. At someone point, I got really bored during these scenes. Also I didn't care about the Marybeth Medina subplot since so little time is spent on it.

With that being said, I still was entertained by the Accountant. I think it is a film that is both intense and engaging, but I just thought it could have been better. I know that there will some people who will really not enjoy this film because of the tone shifts and the occasional slow pacing. But if you can deal with that, I think the Accountant is a film that is worth checking out.

Grade: B