Action-thrillers purposely veer away from reality so their protagonists can be thrust into the most extreme predicaments. Plausibility be damned. The filmmakers throw various story pieces on the table and make a half-hearted stab at fitting them together, leaving plot holes they hope the audience will not notice, or at least not care about. But now and then, along comes a tale where the pieces fit together in a pleasing enough way that, while still ludicrous, they make a picture entertaining enough to reward the hours you spent following the details.
So hang in with the initial disjointed vignettes that skip around in time and pull you into The Accountant.
First: A guy (maybe a plainclothes cop?), gun drawn, trembling in fear, enters a darkened building and follows a trail of bodies up a stairs. Then down a hallway where he hears a guy protesting he wasn’t involved. Whatever the sound we hear is, it can’t be good for that guy.
Second: The parents of an autistic child are meeting with, presumably, a therapist. He’s trying to convince them their son (who’s seated at a nearby table, descending into a fit over a missing puzzle piece) is not impaired but gifted. He offers the boy a few free months of counseling in a calm and safe environment. The father, a military man, won’t have it. He believes his son needs to learn how to survive in the “real” rough-and-tumble world.
Third: Finally, here’s (obviously) the accountant of the movie’s title. Gotta be the kid throwing the fit years earlier, right? Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) is advising a kindly old couple how to best file their taxes to stay out of trouble. He’s gotten his autism under control enough to function in the real world, though his flat, matter-of-fact, emotionless speech is kind of funny.
A little later: Probably a flashback. Christian, attired in prison fatigues, is having a strange conversation with an older inmate, Francis Silverberg (Jeffrey Tambor). Ah, it turns out Francis is acting out scenarios, helping Christian learn how to infer someone’s mood from aural clues. Also: he’s feeding Christian some contact info for his global mob connections.
Finally, the main throughline: Wolff’s handler has his next assignment, wanting him to lay low for a while since international bad guys appear to be looking for him. He visits Living Robotics, where CEO Lamar Blackburn (John Lithgow) needs him to verify if the irregularities that accountant Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick) has found are real or not.
It goes on from there. The good part: None of this is irrelevant. Keep taking mental notes as Ray King (J.K. Simmons), a director for the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit, calls in analyst Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) and coerces her into taking on a case: find a shadowy financial wiz known as … yeah … The Accountant.
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The action continues to jet here and there, but slowly the pieces begin to fit into place, and I’m sure that, if you’re one of those nerds who loves finding and submitting continuity goofs to IMDB, you’ll find some. Chill! Just sit back and enjoy some mindless entertainment.
I haven’t done any reading about Asperger Syndrome, but I’ll take it for granted that Affleck’s performance as a grown man dealing with AS hasn’t been endorsed by the American Psychiatric Association. It’s obviously a device to give Affleck a chance to have some fun with mimicking deadpan expressions while delivering deadpan responses with deadpan emotions. He’s OK. No great, but good … or good enough.
Some notable supporting performances: J.K. Simmons as the Fed who has more than one agenda; Cynthia Addai-Robinson as the reluctant and steadfastly by-the-book agent; Jon Bernthal as the scary mercenary Braxton, a bad guy whose oddly likeable; Jeffrey Tambor, flawlessly at ease as the jailbird whose piece of the puzzle gets filled in late in the picture. Unfortunately, the always watchable John Lithgow is cast so close to type that it removes some of the mystery.
But it’s Anna Kendrick who lights everything up. She’s alternately naïve and knowing as the warm, emotional foil to Affleck’s impassive nerd. She delivers snarky asides with perfect timing, and her own deadpan observations arrive with just the right “I can’t believe what I just heard/saw” tone.
All in all, the performances are entertaining enough to justify forgiving the predictable plot twists as characters turn out to not be who the filmmakers are tempting you to think they are. In the fight scenes – there are always fight scenes – both good guy and bad guy (or good gal and bad gal, in any combination) will take ten times the punishment that any normal human could endure. And yes, too much of that “how did that guy know what that other guy was doing” type coincidences.
And yet, it’s solidly fun and worth the watch just for Anna Kendrick. If you like this, you might as well try The Accountant 2. No Anna, but a crew of teen autistic savants makes up for it.