Director: Gavin O'Connor
Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hours, 8 minutes
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"The Accountant" is directed by Gavin O'Connor and is written by Bill Dubuque. The film is about an accountant, played by Ben Affleck, who goes by the name of Christian Wolff. He works uncooking the books for drug dealers, gun runners and other criminal elements. He has high functioning autism and is a savant when it comes to mathematics and numbers, making him highly skilled and in high demand when it comes to his profession. Christian was raised by his military father who also immersed him in various combat techniques from a very young age. His latest job is for a more legitimate robotics company that builds prosthetic limbs, among other things. Christian has been hired to investigate a discrepancy found by one of the company's accounting clerks, Dana Cummings, played by Anna Kendrick. Eventually, the full scale of the theft is uncovered, and the person trying to hide it wants to remove Dana and Christian from the picture. However, Christian's lifetime of combat training makes him a very deadly adversary.
This film is part dramatic crime thriller, part balls to the wall, mindless action flick. It is not the best script ever written. Some of the storylines don't seem all that important and are borderline superfluous, and others are far too convoluted for their own good. The dialogue gets kind of corny from time to time. It's also not the tightest written narrative and goes full blown inane and trite in the third act, but if you can push all of these criticisms aside, "The Accountant" is really just a fun, mindless action crime thriller. Ben Affleck is awesome as Christian, and his performance here continues his path into full blown action star. And speaking of the action, these scenes are fantastic, well choreographed, and Batman almost always double-taps, which we appreciate. Affleck does a stellar job selling himself as a badass. The hand-to-hand fights sequences are handled rather brilliantly, and Gavin O'Connor does a great job in his direction of them and they way they are shot, unlike other action films like the "Bourne" series where Paul Greengrass makes it his mission to get the audience to vomit while throwing his camera around every which way. The shootouts are also stellar as the character of Christian is a precision marksman, though we don't really know what the connection is between having the character be a high functioning autistic person as well as an expert at shooting guns. The supporting cast does a good job as well. Anna Kendrick is someone we always think does a fantastic job, even in a movie with some problems in its script. As Dana, she is a woman who is excellent at her job to the point where it has gotten her in trouble. She struggles to connect with Christian due to his lack of social skills, but she always remains likable and friendly despite his constant abruptness. Jon Bernthal, J.K. Simmons, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Jeffrey Tambor, John Lithgow, and Jean Smart round out the supporting cast. Bernthal plays a hit-man tasked with taking out Dana and eventually Christian. He's part psycho, part apologist, and is always fun to watch act in movies. Addai-Robinson and Simmons play a duo of Treasury agents. These parts could have been left on the cutting room floor, but since they were included, we think they give excellent performances, even if we do question the necessity of some of their story lines.
Despite its flaws and an expected ending, "The Accountant" makes for a really fun watch at the cinema. Though it feels a little long, it remains thoroughly entertaining throughout its run time, even if it ventures into the dumb, trite territory from time to time.
My Rating: 7/10
BigJ's Rating: 7/10
IMDB's Rating: ~7.9/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: ~51%
Do we recommend this movie: Sure, why not?
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