Ben Affleck is Christian Wolff a man of many aliases and quite a whizz at cooking the books for any major league crooks who want to launder a great deal of illegally made money. Known as The Accountant, his autism makes him an obsessively detailed figure man, but it’s his schizophrenia that makes him enjoy being a ruthless gung-ho gun toting killer who has no hesitation in seeing off anyone in his way.
When Christian was a kid and first diagnosed with a severe form of Aspergers syndrome his military father overruled his mother about getting specialist therapy treatment and instead whisked Christian and his sibling off to Japan to literally beat some toughness into him instead.
When we first meet Christian as an adult he has transformed himself into a nerdy looking accountant working out of a suburban strip mall doing the taxes of local farmers. It is however all a front for his real life as a pumped up machismo guy who works as analytical auditor for hire for some heavy-hitter companies who need their real wealth hidden. How he gets his clients is one of the facts conveniently left quite vague in this fast paced drama, but he ends up at Living Robotics where Dana (Anna Kendrick) a young junior bookkeeper has stumbled across a whole tranche of missing money in the company’s accounts.
It takes Christian no time in locating the loss and who may be responsible for it, but at the same time a mysterious gang have also reached the same conclusion and they end up dispatching the culprit in their own way. That puts Dana and Christian at risk too, and if that is not enough, he is also being tracked down by a Federal Agent as the Treasury Department have been following his criminal activities for some time now and are gradually closing in.
Written by Bill Dubuque and directed by Gavin O’Connor this fast paced thriller with a geeky savant as an unlikely hero is the perfect role for Affleck who can convincingly down play his whole rugged tough man look when it suits him. It’s a very interesting perspective, and in fact the best parts of the movie are when he has this logical straight-faced deadly-serious attitude about even the most trivial things. Deliberately avoiding filling in all the details of the plot strands to add to the intrigue works really well, and allows us to be totally surprised by the neat unexpected twist at the end.
Wolfe doesn’t interact with other people too well at all, so Dana as the potential love interest doesn’t have much chance at all, but Anna Kendrick does fill her shoes beautiful. There is a sterling supporting cast that includes JK Simmons as the chief Treasury Agent plus Jeffrey Tambor, John Lithgow and Jean Smart, but they really are just cameo roles. The only one other significant performance is by Jon Bernthal as Wolfe’s older sibling.
What spoils this movie which starts out so full of promise as this quirky and intriguing thriller with its unexpected protagonist is the end part when it finishes off being just another overly long and very bloody gun battle. However, regardless of the finale, die-hard Affleck fans will so love seeing him shine in this, especially as he is so good at playing bad.
