2016 - THE ACCOUNTANT, kind of absurd action thriller

With the internet suddenly full of movie trailer ads for The Accountant 2, it's probably time to take a look at the first film in what is apparently an attempt to turn future Accountant movies into an action series with Ben Affleck playing sort of an autistic James Bond.

Ben Affleck an autistic savant, is a wiz with numbers (he's an accountant).  He's also, a martial arts expert and an expert with firearms.  At times he works for the mob doing their books but at other times he's a secret high level informant for a member of the Treasury Department.  Affleck gets hired to check the books at a start up robotics company where he discovers embezzlement is going on.  This in turn leads to a group of hit men attempting to kill him and his female accountant helper in order to silence them of course. The female accountant is played by Anna Kendrick who looks like a midget standing next to accountant Affleck.   Little do these hit men know they are about to run into a real autistic killing machine.

The story is rather ludicrous, the action scenes are the usually shaky hand held camera mess and with the exception of Ben Affleck the characters are for the most part not really well defined.  The back story on how Affleck became a number crunching killing machine is essentially unbelievable.  Still when you take all of these things into consideration this is an entertaining action film even with all of this plot nonsense. 

 

The Accountant is blessed with a good cast even if a lot of their roles are small.  JK Simmons is Affleck's Treasury Department contact.  John Lithgow is the head of the robotics company, Jean Smart is his sister.  Jon Bernthal is a mysterious hit man and Jeffrey Tambor is a mob bookkeeper who teaches Affleck everything there is to know about sneaky accounting.  The Accountant is yet another example of a good cast really holding a movie together when the screenplay is not so hot.  Good actors have saved many a questionable movie.

The film was written by Bill Dubuque, the running time is 128 minutes.