Director: Gavin O’Connor
Writer: Bill Dubuque
Cast: Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, J.K Simmons, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Tambor, Cynthia Addai Robinson, John Lithgow
In an industry saturated with prequels and sequels, remakes and adaptations, Gavin O’Connor helmed THE ACCOUNTANT set out to bring forth a fresh breeze. Bill Dubuque’s conjuring of an original storyline, however, with not so original ideas, tries to marry two very separate genres resulting into the creation of an abomination instead of the lovechild that could have been.
The story revolves around a high functioning autistic accountant who moonlights as a person cooking the books for a dangerous clientele. Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), an accountant of immense skill, operates out of a busted strip mall in rural Illinois. He finds himself amidst corporate illegalities when he miraculously comes through in conducting his forensic analytical sorcery overnight and uncovers intricate irregularities from years of data. This warrants assassination attempts on the protagonist who employs skillsets acquired owing to his double life and escapes to only immerse himself in a path of saving the damsel-in-distress, Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), the in-house accountant of the corporation. Regurgitating the common plotline of doling out justice and righting wrongs, the script sends its protagonist on a nearly obsessive hunt to only tug at threads that scatter further than the random skirmish.
The primary plotline promises a gritty action thriller having Gavin O’Connor at the director’s chair, the man who brought the daunting brutality of mixed martial arts wrapped around a gut-wrenching drama of family feud in a Cain and Abel setting for his 2011 flick WARRIOR starring Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton. However, what gets served up is a convoluted mess with inconveniently handled subplots and a fusion of genres which only hampered their individual potential. The movie digs its own hole when it pretends to exploit the niche of revenge stories with a charismatic shoot-em-up styled protagonist and then veers off to oscillating between vignettes of mistimed character studies and opposite spectrum narrative viewpoint. The movie cultivates its rich cast into mere tools of exposition while continuously hindering the momentum of the storyline, albeit a paper-thin one at that, with flashbacks that attempt at mapping the tumultuous psyche of the protagonist. The rough childhood of Christian Wolff is a character study that remains praiseworthy when viewed superficially but with a serious peek it seeps out a major flaw for a movie that pretended to tackle a complicated issue such as autism. The veil that covers the portrayal of Wolff’s childhood can be mildly said as a gross oversimplification of neurodiversity, which, when upholding the issue of autism, criminally resorts to the stereotyped projection of a person lacking empathy. Exploiting the common and overdone origin of superheroes i.e an emergence of an ability from a ‘limitation’, THE ACCOUNTANT throws away any means of originality which it should have leaned upon. By the time the movie ends, the viewers are catered with three different plots and nothing to bind them organically and thus creating gaping questions that are answered in a rushed third act of the film.
Oscar winner J.K Simmons winds up in the movie to play a veteran US Treasury Director, Ray King, who is at the eve of his career and tries to justify, with his measly presence, the angle which remained the genesis of the jumbled mess – a financial thriller. King calls upon analyst Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai Robinson) to investigate and identify the man behind the accounts of the criminal elite and thus ends the extent of these characters who remain but in a tangential path to that of the protagonist. With little to no character development, King and Medina only serves to build up the godliness of the protagonist. “Who survives this kind of clientele?” King muses. Simmons squanders the momentum gathered through his repulsive and tough Terrence Fletcher (WHIPLASH) to play a lukewarm character which can only be shrugged off as an easy paycheck while John Lithgow baffles with his sad judgement in venturing with a poorly written character all the while emanating his magnificence into that of Winston Churchill (THE CROWN). But, when all is said and done, comes the limelight of farce in the like of Jon Bernthal, gasping and smirking, with a character who is the very incarnation of coincidences.
THE ACCOUNTANT set out to be an empathetic peak into the spectrum disorder but remains an allistic one at that. Bill Dubuque’s storyline employs the staples of such movies and ingloriously gropes at every straw, from Affleck’s pouts to Kendrick’s stammer, from Simmons’ sullen nature to Applied Behavior Analysis Therapy, but misses the very essence which THE JUDGE was built around – the untangled simplicity. The mathematical savant is told by his father that ‘sooner or later, different scares people’. In the case of this formulaic serving, it can be said that it may be sooner, sameness will scare people.
My Verdict
My Ratings
2
THE ACCOUNTANT set out to be an empathetic peak into the spectrum disorder but remains an allistic one at that.
