Film Review: ‘The Accountant’

After watching Ben Affleck’s grim turn as the Caped Crusader in “Batman v Superman,” the filmmakers for “The Accountant” found a fresh way to address their star’s utter humorlessness – they cast him as an autistic man, Christian Wolff.

Under the direction of Gavin O’Connor, Affleck, positively thrumming with anti-charisma, acts the heck out of his role. Someone told him that autistic people push their glasses up the bridge of their nose, so he does that all the time.

Christian is, you’ll be shocked to learn, great with numbers and does forensic accounting, uncooking the books for organizations as diverse as the Juarez cartel and the Camorra.

As a side benefit for his clients, he’s also great at killing people in a obsessive compulsive way, leaving neat, dime-sized holes in their skulls. This is because Christian’s militaristic father (Robert Treveiler) responded to his young son’s diagnosis by training him and his little brother to hurt anyone who made fun of them.

Money laundering for mafiosi is significantly more romantic than the gig Christian takes for the prosthetics manufacturer Living Robotics, where it seems $61 million has been misplaced. The principal, Lamar Black (John Lithgow), wants to know where exactly the cash has gone and engages the uber-bean counter to assist internal partner Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick, whose chipmunk pluck is settling into shtick). After hastily establishing that she’s a decent accountant too, the script has her awkwardly woo Mr. Wolff. They talk about art, or at least a painting of card-playing dogs, which Christian finds funny: “Dogs would never play poker. It’s incongruous.”

As cinematic math whizzes are wont to be, Christian is so absorbed in his work that he scribbles financial notations across not only the whiteboards but also the windows of his office. And when the camera shoots through the glass ... look – it’s a man made of numbers! He expends a lot of dry erase marker ink to reveal corporate malfeasance and, shortly thereafter, a lot of bullets to dispassionately dispatch the hit squad that comes after Dana.

She seems to take the high body count in stride, and, as all students of cinema history know, any woman saved from death must immediately sleep with the man who kills her assailants. But Christian proves himself hard wood to whittle – he’s upset because he wasn’t able to finish the accounting job to his satisfaction. To complicate things further, a very trepidatious Lamar Black calls in backup in the form of Brax (Jon Bernthal, who overdoes brashness the way Affleck overdoes dullness), the only contract killer around as skilled as Christian.

Aside from the bad guys, there are lawmen trying to piece together the story. As Treasure Department honcho Ray King, J. K. Simmons mentors the young agent Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), though he’s a much less amusing teacher here than in “Whiplash.” She’s tasked with ferreting out the true identity of this mystery accountant so she spends a long while grimacing at computer screens. Her big break is that Christian’s pseudonyms are always the names of famous mathematicians, but she has to Google all the way to the Ws to find that out.

The filmmakers’ viewpoint is that audiences love puzzles, especially when they’re solved for them – they show many actual puzzles to ensure we get this metaphor. The only issue is this jigsaw movie has about four pieces and the image it reveals is trite.

One could say “The Accountant” makes a powerful statement about how someone with autism can be a badass superhero. Another powerful statement would be presenting someone with autism on screen and not defining them by their difference.