Movie review: 'The Accountant's' plot doesn't quite add up
October 14, 2016 12:00 AM
Q: What do you get if you cross “Rain Man” with “The Terminator”?
A: “The Accountant,” starring Ben Affleck in the title role.
He’s Christian Wolff, an autistic math wizard with no social skills but plenty of others to make up for it. During childhood, he and his quiet brother were subjected to brutally competitive training by their military monster-father — to “toughen them up” for a cruel world.
Starring: Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal.
Rating: R for strong violence and language throughout.
Nowadays, in obsessive-compulsive adulthood, Christian needs everything around him to be neatly organized, including his bacon and eggs, his silverware, his wardrobe and his Airstream trailer — a kind of getaway Batmobile, containing a vast cache of weapons and international currency, plus an original Renoir.
How does a humble bean counter come by such?
Seems that, under cover of a small-town CPA office, he’s a secret accountant and money launderer for the world’s most dangerous criminal organizations, and the Treasury Department’s crime division chief (J.K. Simmons) assigns a reluctant agent (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to track him down. But in the meantime, Christian takes on a legitimate client (John Lithgow), whose cutting-edge robotics company is mysteriously bleeding cash. A low-level accounting clerk there (Anna Kendrick) has discovered the problem, and soon discovers a romantic attraction to Christian, even as he discovers himself between the rock and hard place of two deadly conflicts.
What number-crunching lacks in photogeneity, body-crunching supplies: Uncooking these books requires not just a wall-size spreadsheet, but plenty of bedsheets to spread over the corpses added and subtracted along the way. Adjusted gross mayhem is high. So is the bloody liquidity and net loss of credibility. Standard deduction: This crime syndicate has a bottomless well of personnel. Six killers are assigned to erase the diminutive Ms. Kendrick. A full battalion is dispatched to get Mr. Affleck in the finale.
Give director Gavin O’Connor credit for the intense — if insanely violent — action sequences and deafening sound effects accompanying them. (My arm is still recovering from deep fingernail wounds inflicted by a female companion.) But give Bill Dubuque debit for a screenplay with enough holes to fill the Albert Hall. It’s a jigsaw puzzle with more than one piece missing re: Christian’s motivation and skill set acquisition.
Which brings us to Mr. Affleck’s characterization: He makes little eye contact and his facial expression never changes — conforming, one assumes, to Christian’s high-functioning autistic nature. But his bizarre self-flagellating “calming rituals” and Zoloft dependency are dubious, as are his 007 super agent qualities. He’s his own Dirty Dozen rolled into one.
A didactic epilogue and schmaltzy exit song aren’t quite enough to provide redeeming sociopolitical correctness. Hollywood has long exploited autistic-savant characters for their (often exaggerated) intelligence and stereotyped inability to express feelings. This is a missed opportunity to raise awareness of real differently abled issues, such as the fact that autism is increasing.
There’s depreciation of the blood-and-guts action genre posing as a character study. While capital gains at the box office justify the mayhem for the studio, I’m inclined to write off “The Accountant” — and wonder where’s the death tax when we need it?
Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: parispg48@aol.com.
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