The Accountant

Attention-Deficit
or
Settling All Accounts

Gavin O'Connor's a busy director these days. His last film, the little-seen Natalie Portman Western, Jane Got a Gun was released a mere nine months ago.*

But, he is probably best known for the Disney-financed film of the 1980 "Miracle on the Ice," Miracle, as well as the 2011 Tom Hardy MMA film Warrior (television watchers may know him for directing the pilot of the popular TV series "The Americans").

His credentials for working fast and efficiently and with no flab associated with his movies is well-known.

The Accountant (like Jane Got a Gun) was on the 2011 "Blacklist" of well-regarded un-made scripts for that year. An original screenplay, it followed the action market with a twisted tale of revenge and detection.

Its hook? "The Accountant" is a mercenary on two fronts—he cooks the books of cartels while also pursuing "bad-guys" who have done "bad things," and he's autistic. He runs a little tax business out of Small-Town, Illinois, where he helps folks pull through on their taxes and he does some consulting work on the side. He's well-known for being "nothing short of supernatural" with accounting and he's often in demand for moving funds, finding depreciations, and making money disappear and magically reappear. He gets his work-referrals from a closed-loop system that advises and watches over him and when he mentions doing something contrary responds with "heavy sigh." 

Right now, he's supplementing his income tracing irregularities for a high-tech prosthetics firm called Living Robotics that is looking to go public, but a junior accountant (Anna Kendrick) has found some irregularities in the ledgers and the Accountant (going by the name of Chris Wolff), played by Ben Affleck, meets with the corporate heads (Jean Smart, Andy Umberger and John Lithgow)—one lovely exchange has Wolf being told he'll get ten years worth of records to examine: "How long have you been CFO?" "Fifteen years" "Then, I'll need your records for the past fifteen years..." While he starts preparing for the audit, things are happening in Washington D.C.

Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson, she's TV's version of Suicide Squad's Amanda Waller on "Arrow") is called into the office of the head of financial crimes division (J.K. Simmons) at the Treasury Department. "Do you like puzzles, Agent Medina?" he asks her and proceeds to give her a doozy. The Treasury head, Ray King, has all sorts of surveillance photos of various cartels meeting in plain sight, but the one thing they have in common is one man, never in clear view, but identifiable by stature and dress which is similar between all snaps. King has a file on Medina showing that she lied about a past criminal record on her Fed application—a felony offense. Her puzzle is to identify the man in the photos and she has two weeks to do it. At the end of the two weeks, she either has the answer and keeps her job, or is charged with that felony.

In the meantime, Wolff splits his time between at LRI and his business, and his modest suburban home and a bay in a public storage facility where he keeps an air-stream trailer—his home-away-from home. There, he conditions himself with loud music and irritating lights, while he does some rudimentary calisthenics. That trailer is a combined fortress of solitude, arsenal and bank, where he keeps his collateral in the form of collectibles (paintings and vintage comic-books, mostly), gold bars and easily-available cash. His front is the house, very wired and camera'd, and we learn a little bit about his background through flashbacks.

He's diagnosed as autistic with sensitivity to light and noise, but totally driven. A tour of a school for the condition is attractive to his parents, who have another son, Braxton, but his father, an Army lifer, puts the kibosh on the idea, intending, instead, to instill discipline into the child's world, rather than closeting him away in a school. The child will have to learn his way, make his choices about his path, and he must do it in the real-world, not protected—if anything, he will have to learn to fight and be self-sufficient.

Back at LRI, he starts work. The junior accountant who found the discrepancies, Dana Cummings, has stayed up all night gathering the doc-boxes and PNL statements and Wolff dismisses her help and expertise without so much as a "thank you." He then pulls out his dry-erase markers—there are a lot of them—and begins work in a conference room on the white-board at one end of the room. 

Pretty soon, the calculations are filling up the white-board and the markers are being tossed into the waste-basket as they go dry. Wolff works through the night and the white-board, eventually using the windows of the conference room to continue the calculations. He doesn't stop, but by the beginning of the next business day, every window has been filled and by the time Cummings walks in, Wolff, displaying more emotion than he has throughout the entire movie is able to go over the calculations, showing that eventually $61 million went missing from Living Robotics—he hasn't figured out how and by whom, but he will not get a chance to, as the CEO's sister walks in, asks for his progress, and dismisses him, telling him his work is done.

It isn't, though...not to Wolff's satisfaction. It sets him off his routine, which manifests itself in little miscalculations and annoying little errors. What he doesn't know—besides the investigation going on about him across the country—is that there is a player on the other side, an assassin (Jon Bernthal), an outlier, who's been making his way through the LRI economic infrastructure. It was this assassin who convinced the LRI CFO to commit suicide in order to prevent the hit-man from killing him...and then killing his family. Money may not trickle down, but blood does. And when the assassin targets Wolff and the lowly Dana Cummings, he goes into a more aggressive stance...to settle accounts. 

The Accountant is a good little actioner, a bit unique, smart in not-obvious places, and obvious in some usual places. A lot of good actors, doing good, in not often inspired work. It keeps you engaged by jumping back and forth in time in order to give you some back-story and some education, and the action is done efficiently, and gun-nuts will appreciate the hardware. It's well-done, and has half a brain in its head. The last twenty minutes seem a bit rote, but still manages to toss in a twist or two.

Recommended.

* It was filmed in 2013 and been held up from release for various issues, including legal. O'Connor replaced director Lynne Ramsey after financial issues with the producer, caused her to walk out on the project.