The Accountant Review

One Line Review

The Accountant features incredible acting with great action scenes, but leaves a little to be desired with the story leaving me with no choice but to give it a B+.

The Accounting of The Accountant

I walk into Ben Affleck action movies coming to expect a couple things now – Reindeer Games. I know that is probably not fair at this point, but when you set a bar that low, it’s time to reevaluate a thing or two really. However, The Accountant was a smart action movie which is just weird to type.

The premise of the movie is that a man (Ben Affleck) with an extreme case of Asperger’s Syndrome is made into a finely tuned assassin, but after being imprisoned by the military, takes his skills to the wild world of international shady accounting, because why not.

The movie sets out with him taking a “safe job” in the United States as his last couple jobs were too dangerous only to come in contact with a shady CEO of a tech company (John Lithgow) and a young accountant who discovers his shadiness at the worst possible time (Ann Kendrick). We are also following the exploits of the Treasury Department where two agents (J.K. Simmons and Cynthia Addai-Robinson) are trying to locate the accountant and bring him in.

However, through a series of shenanigans, the accountant avoids being assassinated and ends up fighting with the Punisher (no, not really the Punisher, but the man who plays him Jon Bernthal) because they both have taken jobs on opposite sides of the fight.

There are some twists and turns and a twist at the end that I won’t spoil for anyone, but this serves as a general Reader’s Digest summary of the movie.

The Parts in the Black

Yes, these are accounting puns. No, I don’t care if you like them or not…

Strong acting really carried this movie. Simmons and Addai-Robinson had a great back and forth going on that made up for their kind of periphery role to the story. They are more there to drive the back story of the character than they are to actually drive the main storyline. It’s a unique way of storytelling that I really enjoyed.

Affleck and Kendrick worked well together – not something I expected. It really felt like someone a touch on the socially awkward side developing a crush on a girl. Plus, the dynamics of the interactions between Affleck and Bernthal, while very few, were some of the best parts of the movie.

The Parts in the Red

So not everything was great about the movie. A couple of the “twists” seemed very Hollywood trope-esque and I kind of saw them coming. It also seemed to lean very heavy on the flashback thing, which is an action movie staple, but there was quite a bit of it in this movie.

It also seemed to lean very heavy on the flashback thing, which is an action movie staple, but there was quite a bit of it in this movie. I can live with a flashback or two, but there were several dream sequences and story retells going on in the movie that made it a little much.

The Income Statement

There was far more in the black than the red in The Accountant and while I am not going to call it the next great action movie, it was definitely worth a watch.