‘The Accountant’ review: “Fresh, entertaining fun.”

The Accountant review: More than a generic action thriller, this Ben Affleck vehicle crosses Good Will Hunting with Jason Bourne. How can that be a bad thing?

The Accountant review, Paul Heath, The Hollywood News.

Post-Batman Ben Affleck flexes his action muscles in a surprisingly entertaining thriller from Gavin O’Connor following his western fare Jane Got A Gun, which we reviewed positively last year.

Affleck plays Christian Wolff,  The Accountant of the title, a maths genius who works out of a generic office named ZZZ Accounting in Plainfield, Illinois, a small village in middle America. There, he cooks the books for various crime families and takes calls from ‘The Voice’, a mysterious entity who tasks him with different jobs with a more physical demand. Covering his tracks to perfection, Wolff manages to keep Treasury Agent Ray King (J.K. Simmons) at arms length as he relentlessly pursues him. Just months from retirement, and at his wits end, King brings on board young agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to help him track Wolff down before he hangs up his spurs for good. Meanwhile, Wolff has been hired by a huge firm to un-cook its books when an amount of money goes missing. It is there where he meets Anna Kendrick‘s accounting assistant Dana Cummings whose life is put in immediate danger and the two soon find themselves on the run from both Agents King and Medina and relentless, unknown assassins.

At first, The Accountant comes across as fairly low-rent, cut and paste fodder, but there’s much more to it than that. Affleck’s Wolff is an almost silent protagonist, hindered by autism and personal demons, and the Hollywood A-lister plays him wonderfully. There’s quite the supporting cast with Kendrick bowing in her second film in as many months (following October’s colourful Trolls) as the solid comedy side-kick – even though the actress is massively underused. There’s also fleeting turns from the likes of Jeffrey Tambor, John Lithgow, Jon Bernthal and the aforementioned Simmons, but even they are a limited in their screen time. While this is Affleck’s film, it’s very much a movie with a story helped along by former Arrow star Cynthia Addai-Robinson, an actress whose name is shockingly absent from the film’s poster. She ably plays the cat to Affeck’s mouse in a star-making turn that doesn’t go unnoticed.

The Accountant is an original concept, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if this were a graphic novel adaptation as it has all the traits of one – from the silent, rich, superhero-type in Affleck’s character, one with a deep-rooted personal trauma to overcome for the eventual greater good, the mysterious phone-calls with secret missions to O’Connor’s grand, polished direction.

Violent from the outset, the film won’t appeal to everyone’s tastes. The story is a little predictable in places and the acting very wooden in others, but The Accountant is fresh, entertaining fun that I personally had a great time with.

The Accountant review by Paul Heath, November 2016.

The Accountant is released in UK cinemas on Friday 4th November, 2016.