"Sooner or Later, Different Scares People..."
Call it Taken meets A Beautiful Mind, Gavin O'Connor's latest, The Accountant, is a wild ride of genre bending drama, focusing primarily on the titular accountant, Ben Affleck's Christian Wolff, who aside from being a mathematical genius relies too on his skills as a stone-cold killer to protect himself in the land of illegal book cooking for infamous criminal organisations. Sound preposterous? It sure is, and whilst a film such as Taken and the subsequent B-Movie-esque action thrillers that have seemed to take note of its' success in recent times tend to dwell on their fundamental silliness, The Accountant seeks to look deeper into the characterisation of its' leading character, a figure who is bound to the weakness or strength, depending on how you look at it, of his autistic nature and uses such to become the cold and calculated killer in the heart of the picture. Does this added air of differentiation result in the movie being more than just another throwaway action movie however? Um, not exactly.
Aside from being half an hour too long and featuring yet another annoying add-on character in the form of Anna Kendrick, following in the footsteps of the similarly annoying add-on character in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back recently, The Accountant is a film which tries to balance ambiguity with exposition for its' plot whilst trying to tangle together too many plot lines in order to seem much more complex than it really is. Do they work? Not entirely, yet once the film does get going and into the realms of the B-Movie action genre it really wants to delve into, The Accountant becomes a much more enjoyable ride, one which doesn't scratch above the surface of its' silliness and just becomes another Taken, Jack Reacher and all the other recent action movie throwaways that have somehow become bankable franchises. All in all, The Accountant is pure baloney from start to finish, and the added mystery of its' titular character's differences only adds to the movies' sheer silliness. It doesn't break new ground but doesn't dent the foundation either, it's just too long and too ordinary to be anything special.
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