The Accountant

A thriller should be entertaining and smart, both of which The Accountant is. Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) is not Christian in the traditional sense, but he is a wolf of a hunter, about as accurate as anyone behind a telescopic gun barrel could be.

Yet he's a brilliant accountant at the same time, thank you, autism: He has a savant's grasp of facts and numbers (think Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man) but a serious deficiency in the affective and communicative categories. Affleck plays him with a grasp of disaffection that is almost humorous, in fact is with some of his straight-arrow responses: "I don't guess," he says when queried if he had a hunch about the perpetrator of a fraud.

You see, he is hired by all kinds of wealthy and criminal business people and governments to uncook their books or whatever is necessary to discover fraud or put the books in order. These jobs lead to situations where he is wanted by bad guys or the IRS or whomever. Wolff's legitimate, current job for a robotics company is complicated enough for him to need several glass walls to write on (think Affleck's buddy Mark Damon in Good Will Hunting), taking in hours what would consume days for a host of professional accountants.

And so it goes according to the thriller formula that the bad guys will be on his trail, and he will be made vulnerable by a cute co-worker, Dana (Anna Kendrick), who has some of his math savvy and maybe a bit of sweet for him. The Accountant veers from formula because that romance is of the "chaste-and-from-afar" kind, almost but not quite at the kiss stage. It's pleasant not to be bothered by heavy sex when the complications are of the cerebral, themselves the core of pleasure in this brainy, but not too, action drama.

Unfortunately our autistic hero, trained by a merciless military father to defend himself because dad knew son would always be treated as different, slips into thriller stereotype, e.g. Christian puts down too many hired guns at one time, albeit in the service of a noble retaliation for a prison friend. Although the action is within the parameters of the genre, it here feels overdone given the cerebral contexts that otherwise provide plenty of thrills.

One of the joys of this film is to see Affleck show some acting chops; he may never be like Dustin Hoffman, but he's memorably stoic here, a long way from J.Lo and Gigli.

Before today I saw The Accountant in the theater and I wasn't reviewing back then so here I am. Such a great movie about a wonderfully unique being that is very good at many meticulous details such as mathematics, his work really well and mysterious things. Incredible performances from everyone and well written I'm surprised it wasn't nominated a few years ago! Warms my heart to relate to things, glad I own this amazing film in 4K!

The accountant is an action, crime drama film . directed by Gavin O'connor and starring: Ben Affleck at the leading role.

Story line :

the story is about a mental calculator who works as forensic accountant tracking insider financial deception for numerous criminal enterprises brought to him by an unknown women voice on his phone.

Review :

to me this was by far one of the best films that were released last year, it is not an Oscar film but it is a good one with great acting performance from Ben Affleck, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, J.K. Simmons and Anna kendrick.

Affleck's performance here's one of his best next to his amazing role in Gone Girl 2014 (which i highly recommend you to watch), he really brought to the character everything and show to us how people with autism live.

the action scenes are the soul of the film, i enjoyed them very much especially ben's head shots they were very funny and enjoyable and his fighting skills were really amazing( i just which they had put a little more action to this film, but i guess due to the flashback scenes and the difficult story it would have become too difficult to focus.

As for the brother role it was OK in the flash back but when it came to present time it was a little bit bad and the reason of it is choosing an actor who is totally different in race and physic and i just kept looking at him wondering what the hell they were thinking when they chose him to play the role (even his body figure was totally different from the child's body!) for me that was the only bad thing in this film.

Final rate :

8 out of 10

When it released in theatre i dismissed it thinking it might be a dull movie on an accountant.

Saw this recently (March 2017) on a dvd which i own.

I was expecting another Bourne rip off or shaky cam stuff but this one turned out to be an excellent thriller.

Revisited it again (March 2022) on Amazon Prime but this time with my family.

Affleck did a superb job n he adopted the traits, behaviors and symptoms of autism very well.

There is sufficient character development n the story has good amount of twists n turns.

There is ample amount of action, both gun firing n hand to hand combat.

The headshots r brutal, the body count is high n the movie ended well leaving room for a much needed sequel.

Thankfully it is not shot in hand held camera a la Jason Bourne n Taken style jus to make it appear fast paced.

The movie is engaging n entertaining.

Suspense n tension is maintained throughout.

Director O'Connor succeeded in normalising autism and showing that behavioural conditions should not get in the way of anyone's life.

The song To Leave Something Behind by Sean Rowe is haunting n mesmerizing.

Being on the autism spectrum myself, I took a special interest in "The Accountant". Mind you, the movie isn't about autism. The protagonist is a mildly autistic man (Ben Affleck) who does accounting work for a number of vile people. It isn't long before there's a hit out on him.

A lot of the movie gets complicated from the number of characters. It apparently drew controversy for the depiction of autism (much like how "Rain Man" now draws controversy). Even so, I liked the complexity that they gave Affleck's character; his narrow focuses were accurate for autism. In the end, it's not a great movie, but a clever one. Affleck's performance, plus those of Anna Kendrick, John Lithgow, J. K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal and others make this worth seeing.