The Accountant (2016) [Blu-ray]
Action | Crime | Drama | Thriller

Tagline: Calculate your choices.

Christian Wolff is a math savant with more affinity for numbers than people. Behind the cover of a small-town CPA office, he works as a freelance accountant for some of the world's most dangerous criminal organizations. With the Treasury Department's Crime Enforcement Division, run by Ray King, starting to close in, Christian takes on a legitimate client: a state-of-the-art robotics company where an accounting clerk has discovered a discrepancy involving millions of dollars. But as Christian uncooks the books and gets closer to the truth, it is the body count that starts to rise.

Offering two very different skills to his clients, a financial forensics expert and trained assassin goes to work for a tech mogul who's determined to eliminate those responsible for secretly manipulating the company's financial records.

Storyline: Christian Wolff is a math savant with more affinity for numbers than people. Behind the cover of a small-town CPA office, he works as a freelance accountant for some of the world's most dangerous criminal organizations. With the Treasury Department's Crime Enforcement Division, run by Ray King, starting to close in, Christian takes on a legitimate client: a state-of-the-art robotics company where an accounting clerk has discovered a discrepancy involving millions of dollars. But as Christian uncooks the books and gets closer to the truth, it is the body count that starts to rise. Written by Happy_Evil_Dude

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Michael Reuben, January 14, 2017 There's an early scene in Warner's high-concept thriller, The Accountant, that is emblematic of the entire film. As an autistic boy intently assembles a jigsaw puzzle, he becomes loudly unhinged when he cannot complete the task because a puzzle piece has fallen to the floor out of his sight. Director Gavin O'Connor's film scatters an array of plot fragments across its two-hour running time, and you hold your breath waiting to see whether O'Connor (Pride and Glory) and screenwriter Bill Dubuque (The Judge) will ultimately supply every last piece necessary to complete the picture. When everything finally does snap into place, there's a palpable sense of relief that The Accountant actually fits together.

The accountant of the title goes by the name of Christian "Chris" Wolff (Ben Affleck), although it turns out that he also uses other names, deliberately obscuring his true identity. In flashbacks, we see Chris as a boy diagnosed with autism, who, along with his silent younger brother, is given a brutal and unorthodox education in combat and weaponry by his military father (Robert C. Treveiler). The children's sympathetic mother (Mary Kraft) would prefer treatment at a center run by a kindly neurologist (Jason Davis), but she is overruled. In the present, we see the adult that Chris has become: a solitary, self-contained individual who holds his tics to a minimum and wears a mask of near-normalcy, as he conducts what appears to be a small-time accounting practice from a strip mall storefront in Plainfield, Illinois. (There's much more to Chris's biography, but to reveal it would spoil the fun.)

Chris's facility with complex numerical data has gained him a reputation as a top financial investigator who is available for special assignments. High-profile clients contact him through an anonymous female handler whose only identifying characteristic is the clipped British accent with which she speaks to Chris over a secure telephone line. His latest project is a forensic audit of Living Robotics, a successful tech enterprise that is about to go public, except that a junior member of the accounting department, Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), has discovered a troubling discrepancy. While the chief financial officer (Andy Umberger) resents an outsider's intrusion, Chris is granted full access to the company's records by its founder and CEO, Lamar Blackburn (John Lithgow), and Lamar's sister and partner, Rita (Jean Smart).

Meanwhile, another side to Chris's professional life has caught the attention of a senior Treasury official, Ray King (J.K. Simmons, who has the film's trickiest role and performs it with his customary aplomb). After repeatedly spotting Chris in surveillance photos of the world's most notorious criminals and terrorists, King dragoons a promising young data analyst, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), into identifying and tracking down this mysterious figure. He gives his impending retirement as an excuse for the urgency of the assignment, but there's obviously more to it.

The final set of moving parts in this elaborate machine is an anonymous enforcer-for-hire (Jon Bernthal), who commands an impressively armed band of mercenaries offering whatever degree of violence his client may require. When Chris's investigation of Living Robotics threatens to uncover a complex fraudulent scheme, the anonymous enforcer is hired to shut down the investigation, only to discover that this particular accountant has a lethal skill set that one would never expect from a guy with a pocket protector.

To director O'Connor's credit, he keeps these plates (and many more) aloft and spinning, no matter how wacky The Accountant becomes. He is aided by a first-rate cast that is able to provide the illusion of humanity to characters who are little more than cardboard cutouts, and he cannily exploits small details—including Chris's numerous rituals and Dana's history as an art student—to distract viewers from the story's many improbabilities. Dubuque's script provides the requisite twists and reveals that contemporary audiences have come to expect, but they're not arbitrarily pulled from thin air. The Accountant plays fair with the viewer. When you get to the end, you can look back and spot the clues to the film's central riddles that were hiding in plain sight, much like Chris Wolff himself.

As the title of this review suggests, The Accountant has elements in common with Luc Besson's Leon, of which the main character was also a misfit with an almost preternatural gift for combat and mayhem. But Besson used the action thriller format as a wrapper for an intimate character study, as his titular hero formed an unexpected bond with a young girl, whereas O'Connor's film never attempts to step outside genre conventions. Although it may lack a comic-book provenance, The Accountant fits comfortably within the superhero genre, with autism reclassified as a superpower and a mysterious hero with a secret identity and a troubled back story. What's perhaps most impressive about O'Connor's work here is how he manages to check all the superhero boxes and deliver an involving experience without the aid of expensive CGI or the need to level a city to create a sense of danger. On a production budget of just $40 million, he's delivered a more coherent and engaging narrative than any of Warner's DC films since the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy. Warner's Blu-ray treatment is solid and recommended.

[CSW] -3.8- I thought the film did an excellent job of developing and explaining Ben Afflecks character. I also enjoyed the duplicity of his autism and the fighting skills that his father imbued in him and later how he learned to cope with these abilities / disabilities in adult life (quite the paradox). From personal experience: I know that autistic people have skill sets, its finding it and making it useful too themselves and society that's difficult. Too many times these people are written off because they are different than normal expectations and that's kind of the bottom line in this movie. I also enjoyed his marksmanship skills with a 50BMG Barret rifle and the one mile shots at cantaloupes. In summary this movie is imperfect by design so that only enlightened people will appreciate and get it. I have to admit that I am particularly fond of movies that do a good job of portraying the complexities of the human mind with the corresponding abilities / disabilities that are often overlooked. I wasn't aware that many of the great mathematicians and some authors had some of these same developmental disorders that often borders on genius. I definitely plan to add this film to my library.
[V4.5-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - D-Box


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