Movie Monday: The Accountant

Book By Book

With my college son home sick all weekend, the three of us decided to escape with a movie last night. We watched The Accountant, an exciting and unusual thriller about math! We all enjoyed it very much.

Ben Affleck stars as Christian Wolff, the accountant in the title, a quiet but brilliant man with few people skills. He has been hired by a robotics company to “uncook” their books – that is, to review all of their accounting information with a fine-toothed comb because a junior accountant named Dana, played by Anna Kendrick, found an anomaly amounting to millions of dollars. What Christian finds quickly results in several deaths.

Meanwhile, a Treasury Department investigator named Ray King, played by J.K. Simmons, is getting ready to retire and is obsessed with the mysterious Accountant who he knows is behind the money laundering of major crime families all over the world. He appears in many photos with known criminals, but you can never see his face. Ray blackmails a younger employee named Marybeth Medina, played by Cynthia Addai-Robinson, into helping him track down The Accountant. Although they don’t know his name, we immediately see from the partial photos they have that they are after Christian.

Flashbacks reveal that Christian had a difficult childhood and has autism, which explains his quirks and inability to relate to those around him. However, he senses something different in Dana, right from their very first meeting, and is uncharacteristically drawn to her. She shares his aptitude, fascination, and all-around geekiness with respect to math and has also felt like an outsider much of her life. She was the first one to recognize the anomaly in the books, after all. When the violence begins, he feels protective toward Dana.

This is a very violent movie, with a lot of fighting and shooting and a huge death toll. I don’t generally like that in a movie, but I still liked this one because it is very clever. The reasons behind the violence are complex and interesting. The pieces of the puzzle that are Christian’s childhood and current life only gradually fall into place, at the same time that we are learning about the scam going on in the robotics company and watching the two renegade Treasury Department investigators slowly closing in on Christian, unaware of the current chaos he is embroiled in.

It’s all very suspenseful, exciting, and action-packed but also very smart. The entire cast is excellent (and also includes Jeffrey Tambor and John Lithgow), but Affleck is mesmerizing in this role, holding his emotions close as we slowly see flashbacks of what made him the way he is. In fact, the child actor who plays Christian as a boy, Seth Lee, is also very good. I don’t always like the action-packed thrillers that my husband and sons prefer to watch, but all of us thoroughly enjoyed this one – especially seeing all the pieces slowly come together in the end.

Have you seen The Accountant yet? Do you like thrillers and action movies?

The Accountant was recently released on DVD and is available in Redbox. It is available to rent starting at $3.99 on Amazon Prime (link below); it is only available on DVD from Netflix.