The Accountant (Revisited)

The Accountant is at its best when it focuses on its title character.

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Scott's Self-Indulgent Movie Podcast · Episode 969: The Accountant Revisited

This has been a good year for delayed sequels to R-rated action thrillers that did ok at the box office and got middling critical reviews. We got a Den of Thieves sequel about seven years after the first one came out, that made what I thought were the necessary improvements in the film's formula. And now we've got The Accountant 2, going in a totally different direction than the character action thriller from the first film, in favor of a brother buddy comedy with Affleck and Jon Bernthal reprising their roles. So I thought I'd check out the 2016 original, holy crap ten years since this came out?, and see what I might've missed the first time and what I'm hoping for in round two.

The Setup

The movie follows a man namd Christian Wolff, a man with autism that makes him a savant with numbers...who also happens to manage the books of some of the worst criminals in the world. For his latest job, Wolff has been tagged to look into a biotech company that may have millions of dollars missing from its books. A job that just might put Wolff and his ally at the company, an accountant named Dana Cummings, in danger and force Wolff to reveal his lethal skill set. All the while, a Treasury Department agent with her career on the line tries to track Wolff down...

The Accountant is a perfect example of a movie that would work infinitely better if it cut out a major plotline. The movie that works is Affleck as Wolff going through his investigation while filling in the blanks about the experiences that shaped him, including learning shady accounting for criminals in prison, his rough home life where he was taught to be a warrior by his father, and all of the traumas and tragedies that defined him.

As problematic as it is and can be to portray autism like this character as a super-power, there's an awful lot of empathy demonstrated for folks with extreme forms of autism. The stereotype with folks with autism is that they are emotionally unaware or somehow devoid of feeling.

But the movie has a lot of empathy for Christian's experience and highlights people who treat him with understanding and kindness as in the right (including Jeffrey Tambour's mentor figure and Anna Kendrick's fellow accountant). He's not devoid of feeling. Not even close. He actually appears to feel too intensely and if anything overreacts to situations that threaten people he cares about or don't allow him to close loops. 

This is also the perfect kind of role for Affleck who seems to be his best, as an actor, when he's brooding or going arch, and brooding will work here. This brooding baseline means that when he gets upset, even if it's a tic above where he was, stands out (i.e. him trying to avoid a mental meltdown when all of his work is erased without his permission).

So when the movie goes into action movie mode, this is clearly his and the audience's release valve or his second method of solving problems, using the skills instilled in him by his abusive father (aka he seems to anti-stim or give himself sensory overload on a regular basis by playing flashing lights and loud music and running a post over his shin owwwww).

It's a movie about a man who often fails to make connections trying to keep the ones he has, especially against someone who tried to use his gifts for nefarious means. And Gavin O'Connor, despite not being a known action director, puts in a nice blend of brutal hand to hand combat and tactical shootouts throughout the film before leaning on some of his Warrior experience for mixed martial arts bouts. It's all tense and exciting and often punctuated with a joke to let the "holy shit this dude" of each scene land.

Another thing that stands out about this movie is just how stacked this cast is. This was a mid-budget action thriller with a known lead actor that has: Anna Kendrick, JK Simmons, Jean Smart, John Lithgow, Jon Bernthal, and Jeffrey Tambour all showing up before minute 30. Do this more often. Bring in solid older actors to fill out your movie and it'll be all the better for it because they all kill in these roles. Simmons adds more depth than anyone would've asked for in this role, Jean Smart is a razor and I love her as a CEO-type, and Bernthal's chaotic energy is intoxicating and it is very obvious why they brought him back.

And then there's the Treasury Department angle.

In terms of story, I get why the Treasury Department stuff is here. The movie wants to fill in a bit more about Christian without Christian himself having to tell us because that would be a bit out of character. So we can have someone like JK Simmons drop it instead, not a bad idea, and get a feel for the complex web Christian has developed for himself including working for criminals, taking their money and somehow getting out clean.

But why does he need to work with like...war criminals? This seems to be an addition that's only there because the Treasury Department needs to track him down to find out where all of his money actually goes or what his real motivation for working with these criminals is.

These are also the segments where the movie grinds to a skreeching halt pacing wise because Christian is nowhere near this action and nor are any of the other players. I think this could work if the Treasury was investigating the same case Christian was on, just from a different angle. Because otherwise, these scenes are just elaborate back story with characters we learn little to nothing about throughout the film.

You could also cut out about 15 minutes of these scenes where our Treasury agent is modifying audio where Christian says his self-soothing phrase that also introduces a lot of the medium's worst impulses For example, someone over the phone saying this could be a trauma response but they don't know and she just runs with it and turns out to be right? That's wild behavior.

My hope is that the second film can be a straight-forward case where our two brothers awkwardly try to learn and bond with each other before putting it all together in a giant firefight. Because that's the stuf in this movie that works. The investigation and character work fuels the action and if Number 2 can focus on that, I think we've got good things coming.