THE ACCOUNTANT – Review

Ben Affleck as Christian Wolff in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “THE ACCOUNTANT,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by Chuck Zlotnick. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures ©

Ben Affleck plays an accountant with some special skills and special challenges  in the mystery/action thriller THE ACCOUNTANT. Directed by Gavin O’Connor, what makes THE ACCOUNTANT different from other high-body count thrillers is the protagonist at its center, an autistic math savant. Christian Wolff (Affleck) is brilliant with numbers but has trouble with social interactions. His social difficulties look like autism spectrum, possibly the high-functioning type that used to be called Asperger’s, but his unusual upbringing by his brutal military operative father, designed to help him ward off bullies, has equipped him with skills in martial arts and weapons.

On the surface, Wolff is an accountant with a small office in a strip mall outside Chicago but his real profession is as a forensic accountant auditing the books of big-time criminal organizations, to uncover who is skimming money within those organizations. Wolff’s work has drawn the attention of the Treasury Department’s Crime Enforcement Division and its department head Ray King (J.K. Simmons), who has brought in a promising young analyst, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), to help track down this mysterious accountant.

Aware he is under scrutiny, Wolff decides to keep a low profile by taking a job for a legitimate company instead. Lamar Blackburn (John Lithgow) is CEO and founder of Living Robotics, a high-tech company making robotic prosthetics that is on the verge of an IPO. A low-level accountant, Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), has uncovered a multi-million dollar discrepancy in the books and Wolff has been called in to unravel that puzzle, before the company’s public offering.

Ben Affleck delivers a strong performance as Wolff, who has been shaped by his autism and by his odd and harsh upbringing. Affleck makes Wolff a touching character with dazzling math skills, and the film develops a bit of romance with Kendrick’s character. It is kind of fun to see math whizzes, two of whom are women – both Kendrick and Addai-Robinson play math girls – and an autistic character in lead roles but the film’s story doesn’t always make a lot of sense.

Early in the film, we meet Chris as a child, played by Seth Lee, who displays symptoms of autism and is only close to his younger brother (Jake Presley). Their father (Rob Treveiler) and mother (Mary Kraft) meet with a neurologist (Jason Davis) at his treatment facility, to talk about their difficult son. The scenes act as a sort of clinical description of autism spectrum, although the film is coy about Chris’ diagnosis and never uses those words, allowing the story some wiggle room in developing the fictional character.

When the boys’ father refuses to let his older son go the home-like residential facility for treatment, their mother abandons the family. The boys’ father, who works as a shadowy, globe-trotting military psychologist, then takes the two young boys with him around the world, immersing them in a brutal training program of martial arts and weaponry, purportedly to help them deal with bullies but which looks more like cruelty.

The film then flashes forward to the adult Chris, living his secretive loner life while earning big money, which he  mostly stashes away in his plan to stay mobile. Christian may be socially awkward but he makes a few emotional connections, particularly with a mob-connected prison cellmate Francis Silverberg (Jeffrey Tambor), who puts him in contact with the criminal underworld figures who might be interested in Wolff’s remarkable accounting skills. Meanwhile, an underworld enforcer (Jon Bernthal) seems to be trailing Wolff, or at least his employers.

Affleck’s performance is good, even lifting the movie at times, and the restrained interactions between him and Kendrick have a certain quirky romantic charm. The action is well-done, fast-paced and entertainingly good, but the underlying story tends to unravel, particularly at the end where a couple of surprise reveals make little sense.

THE ACCOUNTANT may has been intended as a kind of Bourne-like thriller, with an action hero character with a particular problem and a mystery at its heart. It does not reach that level but it does give the audience a pretty good action thrill ride, as long as you do not look too deep into its inner workings.

Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars