The Accountant: It didn’t balance

Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) is an accountant who uses his extraordinary mathematical abilities to assist in cooking the books for some unsavoury characters. He would also use some of the loopholes in the American tax laws (à la Trump) to reduce his own earnings, although on one occasion he uses those same loopholes to help a couple that happened to found themselves with a large tax bill. But Wolff also carries with him the marks of his own childhood affected by a form of autism, the abandonment by his mother, and being raised by a father who would inculcate aggressiveness in his children as a defence mechanism to counteract the fact of them being different.

The story is focused on a particular job he takes with a large corporation where he is supposed to investigate some leaks in its finances. There he meets Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick) a lovely and pretty young woman, although extremely loquacious, who would be his assistant. She would be the only person with whom Wolff would develop a kind of link, something that would be important at the time when because of his discoveries he becomes the target of assassination. Wolff, however, is not your ordinary accountant sitting at a desk and fighting with numbers, he is also quite effective with a variety of weapons. This characteristic would eventually make the film lose interest since it would then move from what seemed to be a game of mathematical skills to a mere, implausible sequence of action scenes. On top of that we find Treasury agent Ray King (J.K. Simmons) and his assistant Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) in what seems a redundant secondary story whose connection to the main plot was rather artificial and certainly non-convincing.

“The Accountant”, directed by Gavin O’Connor and written by Bill Dubuque, presents a solid acting by Affleck, Simmons, and the young Kendrick, but in the final analysis, it may only be of interest to those who look for lots of gunshots and fights.
Length: 128 min.
By Sergio Martinez – totimes.ca