The Accountant

The Accountant is being advertised as an action thriller, and I guess that's accurate enough.  But with just a tiny push in the other direction, it could have been considered a comedy.  Filled with improbable plot twists, this is as goofy an action film as we've had in 2016.  And yet, there are moments that the movie seems to realize this, and has fun with itself.  This is not a wholly successful film, but I would be lying if I didn't say I kind of admired it for how off the wall it is.

Picture this.  Ben Affleck plays Christian Wolff, a straight-faced and heavily guarded autistic math genius who spends half his time crunching numbers for major corporations and shady criminals, and the other half as a merciless assassin skilled with sharpshooting skills and deadly martial arts training.  Think Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, if he suddenly somehow morphed into a gun-toting vigilante, and you won't be too far off.  Director Gavin O'Connor (Jane Got a Gun) does his best to juggle the labyrinth plot, numerous twists and multiple characters that the screenplay provided by Bill Dubuque (The Judge) throws at him, but at times it seems to be a bit much.  We have random flashbacks to Christian's childhood, where his father teaches him the deadly arts of fighting so that he can stand up to bullies, mixed with scenes where Christian is picking off hired killers with precise head shots, mixed with scenes that Affleck shares with Anna Kendrick that kind of resemble a romantic comedy of sorts.

If it sounds strange, you don't know the half of it.  And at times, The Accountant can be strange in kind of an intriguing way.  You certainly can't accuse the movie of being yet another cookie cutter formula film.  But, you can say it is very uneven, and yet another disappointment for the fall movie season.  Certain elements just don't gel here.  Take Kendrick, who plays a young woman who becomes fascinated by Affleck's character, gets drawn into his world, and finds herself a target in the criminal underworld.  It's a good performance, bright and kind of funny, but it feels out of place with the rest of the movie, which is usually very serious.  There is also a disconnect in Affleck's performance.  When he's living his day to day life, and portraying a highly functional autistic man, he can be quite good.  But seeing him trying to pull off this kind of performance when the bullets are flying and he's karate chopping bad guys in the neck just comes across as goofy.  It's a hurdle that the movie simply cannot simply cross.

Christian passes himself off as a small Illinois town accountant, helping local families get tax breaks and whatnot.  On the side, however, he cooks the books for criminal organizations.  Some federal agents (portrayed by J.K. Simmons and Cynthia Addai-Robinson) are on his trail, and so are some hired thugs who start showing up after Christian takes a job looking for some lost money and some books that don't add up in a robotic prosthetic company headed by John Lithgow.  It seems that Christian has uncovered some information he wasn't supposed to while going over the company's numbers, and now people are being sent out to kill him, as well as Kendrick's character, who is a fellow accountant that works at the company.  Christian is the sort of person who always has an escape plan and keeps a low profile, but for some reason, he's drawn to Kendrick, and makes it his personal mission to keep her safe.  The British female voice who gives Christian his orders over the phone urges him to move on to another location and start over, but he won't budge until the girl is safe, and all the bad guys after them are dead.

So, Affleck goes into killing machine mode, all the while trying to act as distant and emotionally detached as he can.  And then...Well, I can't really say what happens next without delving into spoiler territory.  All I can say is that there are some third act plot revelations that are so out there, it actually had certain members of the audience laughing at the screening I attended.  The Accountant does hold an interesting idea, and you can see how it could work, but it would require a steady hand, and this movie doesn't have one.  It resorts to camp and over the top violence instead of actually exploring the ideas it raises.  It generates laughs (sometimes intentional, sometimes not) when it's supposed to be creating tension, and the movie just gets harder to swallow as it goes on.  But, I have to admit, the more I think back on the film, I do have a certain admiration for it.  I admire that the filmmakers even attempted an idea such as this.  Sure, it doesn't really work, but darn it, they tried.  And the movie is never boring.  

It is, however, a movie that only works in bits and pieces, not as a whole.  There are individual dramatic moments I enjoyed, and even a couple action scenes that are done well.  But nothing fits together.  In one of the film's early scenes, we see Christian as a child frustrated because he can't finish a jigsaw puzzle, because one of the pieces is missing.  This movie feels kind of like that.  It's incomplete, kind of jumbled, and a lot of pieces are missing that could link what works together.  I will give you this guarantee, though - You've never seen a movie like The Accountant before.

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