The Accountant

Flix!

Gavin O'Connor takes an interesting screenplay from Bill Dubuque and tells it with some great actors, and voila! We have The Accountant.

I wanted to see this because the trailer showed promise. My wife went only because she just wanted to go to the movies. But it turns out we both really liked this film.

Ben Affleck plays a math savant that becomes an accountant. He is incredibly skilled at what he does, and will stay with a project until it is solved. That's part of being a savant. And he also agrees to "uncook" the books for many extremely dangerous clients. Drug cartels, mafia bosses, criminals of every ilk. He is cool and efficient and always gets the job done. But he has to move around a lot and stay off the radar.

The Treasury Department is looking for him, because he has a deep sense of justice and once when a mafia boss betrayed him, he went on a rampage killing 9 of them in 10 minutes. And oh yeah, he is incredibly capable.

As a autistic savant child, his mother couldn't take it and left. His father, a military man, took a strong approach and had his two boys train intensely with several different masters of different subjects. Karate, weapons, endurance, and math. He was highly skilled in electronics and computers as well.
Not a guy to mess with.

Along the storyline, he encounters a young naive accountant (Anna Kendrick) for a big firm who accidentally saw some books she shouldn't have and raises red flags. The President of the company (John Lithgow) calls in The Accountant, to figure out what's going on.

Our antihero finds the problem right away as only a savant could, and immediately he and the naive accountant's lives are in danger. This sense of justice of his kicks in and he is determined to save her.

There are many other elements of the story that were structured to surprise, but I figured them out very early on, and shared them with my wife for proof. And I was correct.

The bottom line is that this was an interesting, nicely paced, storyline, told very well by Director Gavin O'Connor. I will think about this film tomorrow and maybe the next day. And whenever that happens, we usually end up owning it.

I recommend it. An interesting way to spend a couple hours. What's not to love about a good movie?

GRADE: A-