Movie: The Accountant

The Accountant:  I’m looking forward to seeing The Accountant II.  Despite some goofiness in the story line, this movie is entertaining.  Ben Affleck plays this very unusual accountant, Christian Wolff.  We later learn that Wolff is not the character’s real name and it’s unclear whether we’re ever told his true moniker.  When we first meet the Accountant, he is doing what accountants do –helping a couple resolve a tax problem.  He displays no personality and no emotion, which somewhat fits the stereotypic image of an accountant.  This benign segment occurs after the opening shot in which we watch a person entering a crime scene littered with multiple dead bodies.  We then regress to a scene from childhood.  There are individuals and an autistic child.  The child is the Accountant, and Seth Lee does an excellent job playing the child.  This movie is comprised of two intertwined stories.  There is a junior accountant, Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick) who has discovered irregularities in a company’s books and the Accountant is hired by the company to find out who’s been messing with its finances.   John Lithgow gives a quality performance as the head of the company.  In the concurrent story, Raymond King (J. K. Simmons), head of the Treasury Department’s financial crimes division, is trying to learn the identity of a guy who keeps appearing in photos with various criminal heavyweights and terrorists.   King brings in Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to assist him.   As the movie progresses, we meet Braxton (Jon Bernthal).  This is the character whose role in the story led to my comment about goofiness, but to say anything more would spoil the telling of this tale.  With uniformly strong performances by all the main characters and the odd quirkiness of the Accountant, I was entertained throughout this 128 minute film.  The director is Gavin O’Connor.  Bill Dubuque wrote the screenplay.  Escapism and the draw of physical action successfully drives this movie to its conclusion.  But if one dwells on the underlying tale, you cannot ignore its story of a depressing and violent childhood.