CREDIT: WARNER BROTHERS
The Accountant is a confusing, action thriller that tries awkwardly to promote better public understanding about autism.

SPOILER ALERT

The Accountant is an action thriller about a reclusive autistic math genius named Christian Wolff, played by Ben Affleck, who manages a secret life as a forensic accountant analyzing complex financial evidence for the world’s most dangerous criminal organizations.

Wolff’s mother left the family because of his difficult behavior and his father was a demanding military officer who forced his two sons to endure brutal martial arts training. As an adult Wolff works at his cover job, ZZZ Accounting in an isolated plaza helping a few local clients evade taxes. He drives home in a giant Ford truck in scenes that feel like car commercials, eats dinner in his minimalistic home with cutlery set up in a perfectly symmetrical fashion from his cutlery drawer, which only contains one of each utensil at a time. Wolff has a timed daily routine where he turns on a strobe light, plays aggressive industrial metal music and rubs his shins with a pole. When his alarm sounds he takes a Zoloft. He occasionally visits his storage unit bound mobile safe containing drawers full of money, gold bars and coins, rare comic books, original classic art hanging from the walls including a Pollock.

Wolff decides to take on a legitimate client: a robotics company that produces robotic limbs. He meets Dana Cummings, played by Anna Kendrick, who works in the financial department and repeatedly tries to make conversation with the aloof Wolff.

After completing his analysis of the robotics company’s financial accounts in an epic all night session involving so many math equations that Wolff runs out of space on white boards and has to use the board room’s many windows, Wolff identifies missing funds and promptly begins an investigation of the disappearance. His employers abruptly terminate the investigation which Wolff has difficulty accepting because of his extreme focus on the project.

Someone consequently puts a hit out on him and Cummings, so Wolff decides to fight back out of empathy for Cummings who he reluctantly invites into his world.

A side plot runs parallel to the main narrative. Raymond King, director of the United States Department of the Treasury confronts his employee Marybeth Medina for faking her identity in order to hide her criminal past. King has Medina’s criminal record queued up on his computer and proceeds to black mail her into investigating the identity of Wolff, known only to King as a mysterious accountant. The setup for this side plot is an unbelievably dramatic, cheap way to generate suspense by making the stakes as high as possible for Medina.

The ensuing investigative process is laughable, like the work of the creators of a children’s movie who know full well that their audience won’t understand or care about the finer details of the logic running the world that their movie takes place in. Medina has a series of photos of Wolff and an audio recording of a man begging Wolff for mercy before being murdered. Pointless, boring scenes of Medina staring at the photos looking puzzled in different ways at different angles are interweaved with the main narrative until she finally sends them to another department that manages to extract clues without explanation.

Medina listens to the audio clip on repeat before eventually isolating certain frequencies that reveal Wolff reciting a nursery rhyme using a super vague, magic command prompt in a digital audio workstation that likely doesn’t exist. This portion of the movie contributes nothing meaningful or entertaining and condescends viewers by establishing the movie in an oversimplified reality for the sake of convenience.

Despite the unbelievable plot setup, the cast of this movie is great. Affleck brings so much depth and realism to a challenging character. J. K. Simmons as King and Jeffrey Tambor as Francis Silverberg, Wolff’s prison mentor, are perfectly cast and always compelling. Kendrick is undeniably a great fit for her character, though unfortunately the pointlessness of this character makes it difficult to appreciate her good performance.

The Accountant does a fine job portraying symptoms of autism like social interaction difficulties, narrow focus, and stimming- repetitive behaviours like Wolff’s leg rubbing, and concludes with a monologue promoting better understanding and acceptance of autism.

Unfortunately context dulls the intended effect; we see Wolff display a total lack of compassion as he murders person after person for self-preservation purposes. We know that he chooses to help criminals for wealth and helps people evade their taxes, but this is all to be dismissed under the guise of Wolff being a badass, action hero. When the movie demands that you compartmentalize and empathize with Wolff in this specific way it makes your brain feel weird. There are many flashbacks to Wolff’s early childhood struggles that are emotionally powerful and challenging. It’s definitely a credit to the movie that it is bold in this way but ultimately it comes off as a way to create an arbitrary dimension of significance.