Film review: The Accountant is an action-hero tale that doesn’t quite add up

Ben Affleck is better than the soup he finds himself swimming in in this below-par movie about an accountant with a secret.

Ben Affleck and Anna Kendrick in The Accountant. Chuck Zlotnick / Warner Bros Entertainment

The Accountant

Director: Gavin O’Connor

Starring: Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, J K Simmons, Jon Bernthal

Two-and-a-half stars

In Gavin O'Connor's The Accountant, starring Ben Affleck, a number-­crunching paper-pusher – pretty much the opposite of Schwarzenegger or Stallone – gets his shot at action-­hero glory.

If we pull out our calculators, we can deduce that the odds of this are slim. Check the calculations again and you might even conclude that it is a patently ­ridiculous premise.

Yet The Accountant has much grander goals of implausibility, so much so that the script, by Bill Dubuque (The Judge), might well be due an audit. It is about a secretive, autistic accountant who balances the books for prominent criminals, while also being a muscular, military-grade hit man as a hobby, plagued as he is by his father's relentlessly militaristic parenting. As if life was not complicated enough, he then becomes embroiled in an attempt by a robotic prostheses company to go public. Yes, that old story.

To quote John Lithgow’s chief executive at a climactic moment that is both a bloodbath and family reunion: “What is this?”

Affleck’s Christian Wolff is a small-town accountant outside Chicago who spends his days at a bland office and his nights in a trailer parked inside a ­storage unit. There, he ­punishes himself with a bar he painfully rolls over his shins and stares quietly at an original Pollack painting nailed to the ceiling.

He has amassed a hidden fortune as an accountant for hire to drug cartels, money launderers and the mafia. He is, one client says, “almost supernatural” in his ability to run numbers and figure out who is cooking the books.

Padding out the movie are flashbacks to Wolff’s childhood, when his soldier ­father (Robert C Treveiler) refused to accept his ­autistic son’s differences. ­Instead, he raises him and his brother like troops, ­training them with ­specialists.

This origin story – ­complete with a bizarre but formative stint in prison, with a cameo from Transparent's Jeffrey Tambor – plays like a superhero's. Many of the characters, too, feel like they are straight out of a comic book: J K Simmons (Whiplash) as a Treasury Department investigator, Jon Bernthal (The Walking Dead, Daredevil) as an overinflated enforcer, and Anna Kendrick's accounting clerk, seemingly the only person in the movie who knows how to smile.

Affleck's hulking, ­number-crunching accountant is no less severe than his Batman. The actor plays him deliberately flat, with a relentlessly even voice and a dispassionate, antisocial blankness. As was the case in Batman v Superman, he is better than the overcooked soup in which he finds ­himself swimming.

There are legitimate ­objections to be raised about a film such as The Accountant treating ­autistic people like savants.

On the other hand, there are also genuine gestures here about accepting the gifts of people with the condition and it is worth noting how unusual such territory is for a Hollywood thriller – something ­O'Connor ­(Warrior, Pride and Glory) knows how to firmly construct.

The Accountant is, if ­nothing else, singular in lending an action-movie cliché an absurdly peculiar and elaborate backstory.

"I like incongruity," Wolff says. The Accountant does, too, but maybe just a bit too much.