The Accountant: Movie Review

The Accountant is a contemporary action thriller, set in the present day America. It stars Ben Affleck as the bone breaking, autistic money counter, Christian Wolff. He is a spreadsheet savant and a real butt-kicker, nearly indestructible with an unfazed personality, which means he cannot be distracted as he is a combination of a forensic accountant for the unlawful and a super assassin with high-grade ammunition and high-grade anti-social skills.

Critical Acclaim for The Accountant

The first scene reveals Christian’s parents seeking for professional help for him. His brother (Baxter) is normal; he is shown alongside a little girl who seems to be autistic too – she’s being helped by an assistant to put her shoes on. At this point, it is clear that Christian is autistic, his mannerisms include peculiar repetitive hand movements and a persistent need to have things organized. Also, for him to be comfortable, he needs to complete tasks.

While in the psychiatrist’s office, he finds a box of jigsaw puzzle and starts putting the pieces together, we see him doing this quickly. When there are just a few jigsaw pieces left, we see him get very nervous screaming,”need to finish, need to finish” while frantically searching for the last piece of the puzzle. He’s helped by the little girl who finds the last piece on the floor.

He fixes the final piece, the camera angle shows what he has done but all we see is gray, the camera focuses on the glass table and we realize that little Christian Wolff had fixed the puzzle upside down to form a picture of a boxer in the ring.

This Gavin O’Connor movie casts Ben Affleck as an autistic math savant with more love for numbers than actual people. Using a small CPA office as cover, he works as a forensic accountant for dangerous criminal organizations. When he finds out that treasury agent Ray King (J. K. Simmons) has taken an interest in him, he takes up a new legitimate client, a state-of-the-art robotics company where he tries to solve a discrepancy in the company’s books that causes the rise of a high body count as Wolff uncovers truths.

The strength of this movie lies in its tone. The main character is not cast as a super freak that has special powers because of his autistic nature, but as a prototype for a wonderful mutant, something like a superhero. Affleck syncs into this role with an almost perfect blend, acting it out more like Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. He embodies a perfect blend of beautiful math wizardry and a solid adherence to a moral code. This easily makes him one of the most ruthless characters ever.