The Accountant
(2016 review)

3 outta 5

The Accountant features high-stakes accounting, number crunching and bone breaking violence, which sort of evens the whole thing out.  The flick is a bit of a slow burn, some plot threads don’t have a satisfying resolution, it’s too long, and lingers a bit too much on secondary characters anguished monologues.   But if one wants to see good actors doing thespian stuff in a very slick way, The Accountant mostly delivers. 

Two federal agents, Ray (J.K. Simmons) and Marybeth (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) are on the case of a mysterious and murderous accountant (Ben Affleck).  Since crooks can’t use accountants legally, this accountant is someone criminal bosses call in to organize their money laundering.  The accountant is currently looking into missing money at a tech company run by Lamar (John Lithgow).  He is assisted by Dana (Anna Kendrick) but when an assassin, Brax (Jon Bernthal), starts piling up corpses, the accountant has to use accounting and killer assassin skills to solve the case.

Characters talk about the accountant in The Accountant, almost every single scene, even when Affleck isn’t in the movie.  Considering most of the film’s dialogue is about how dangerous, deadly and awesome the accountant is it can get a bit wearying.  Affleck’s performance is actually kind of fantastic.  It is a study in still moments, quiet muttering, awkwardly funny interactions and explosions of intelligence and violence.   What works is that Affleck’s accountant is sympathetic even though he’s a literal stone cold killer.  Flashbacks to his difficult childhood gives the character a sense of weighty tragedy. 

Kendrick is sort of the love interest role but what is interesting is that she never quite becomes the stock girlfriend, at most Dana and the accountant sort of look at each other forlornly.  She is an introvert like him so they relate to each other.  She is such a good actress that even small moments Kendrick can find an emotionally profound beat or a briefly funny moment.   As the guy employing the accountant, Lithgow goes from doddering old coot to mastermind.   Bernthal plays yet another killer like he did as Shane in Walking Dead or Frank Castle in Daredevil but this time he makes a few dry quips.  Usually, Brenthal’s characters are tortured by inner demons but here his assassin character is pretty stable.   There is a distinct contrast drawn between the two killers of the accountant and Brax which leads to an interesting climatic showdown. 

Gavin O’Connor directed The Accountant and it continues his streak of competently made films such as Pride and Glory and the Natalie Portman starring Western Jane Got a Gun.  It isn’t as good as his crowing achievement, the MMA sports drama Warrior but The Accountant does show hints of greatness in some brief spurts.  Frustratingly, there are unresolved plot threads at the end of The Accountant which seems like the film is setting up an Accountant Cinematic Universe. 

There are some great actors here and generally each one gets a stirring monologue that lets them show off their acting chops.  But it starts to feel a tad manufactured when almost every character has a scene where they jabber about their sad history. Addai-Robinson’s Marybeth is introduced with a convoluted, tragic history which makes for a good scene but is never really mentioned again and has no bearing upon the story.  Still this is a superbly staffed roster of great actors who make the movie better than it really should be. 

J.K. Simmons’ stuff about his character trying to track down the mysterious accountant has some solid drama but never reaches a satisfying climax.  Sure, that may be the point, sometimes people investigate mysteries that don’t have any answers, but all of the stuff with J.K. Simmons feels like it’s going somewhere until it doesn’t. Which is weird and unsatisfying. 

The third act offers multiple twists.  One twist is so out left field one could either appreciate it for how random it is or one could be incredibly annoyed at how it flips the narrative.  O’Connor structures some fantastic scenes like when Ray is stuck in a hallway trying to track down the killer accountant, or when the accountant has to face off against a squad of assassins.  O’Connor’s films allow for a lot of character moments, however, it does make the flick a bit on the flabby side.   The movie is over two hours and if it had shaved off some meaningful dramatic pauses, it could have been a lot zippier.  Since the movie involves crunching numbers, there is a scene where Affleck writes down a whole string of dollars on whiteboards and then on glass, taking over an entire conference room.  It’s nicely done but it looks like just about any scene in a movie where a genius grabs a marker and starts to write stuff on walls to show how smart they are.

The Accountant manages to wring drama out of surprisingly thrilling scenes of accountancy and brutal action.  Things may get a tad convoluted in the third act but there is definitely enough good stuff here.  Sure, forensic accounting may be boring but it is a lot more exciting if somebody gets shot in the head.