Movie Review: 'The Accountant' 2016

The Accountant

Directed by Gavin O’Connor

Written by Bill Dubuque

Starring Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, Jon Bernthal, J.K Simmons

Release Date October 14th, 2016

Published April 24th, 2025

The Accountant stars Ben Affleck as ‘Christian Wolf,’ your average autistic accountant. Or so you might think. In reality, though he does love accounting, Chris’s real gig is murder for hire. If there is a criminal that is flying above the law or exploiting the innocent, Chris gets a call from his handler and sets about putting things right. Having been trained by his father to defend himself like a Navy Seal, Chris uses his physical gifts, and his steel trap autistic brain to root out and kill the baddies.

For his latest case, Chris has been hired by a tech firm to find where money has been disappearing to. This leads to a conspiracy at the highest level of the corporation, a series of dead bodies, and one innocent young woman, Dana (Anna Kendrick), caught in the middle. Chris needs to unravel the conspiracy and keep Dana safe from the bad guys who want to take her out for being the first person to notice that money is missing. More than 60 million dollars in missing money is more than enough for some to justify murder.

Running parallel to Chris’s story is that of Ray King (J.K Simmons), the head of the Treasury Department security team. Ray is eager to find Chris as he’s been linked to a mass killing of mobsters at a mob hideout in New York City. For reasons Ray has not been able to determine, Chris killed everyone in the building except for him. Helping Ray is a rising star in his department, Agent Medina (Cynthia Addai Robinson), who may or may not be getting recruited to replace Ray when he finally retires

There is a third track of story happening as well that contains an important spoiler that I won’t mention here. It features Jon Bernthal in the role of a security expert working for the corporation that Chris was investigating. Bernthal's Braxton is dangerous and working outside the law himself, making him a formidable foe for Christian. John Lithgow and Jean Smart are our potential big bads but you will need to see The Accountant for yourself to find out who is pulling the strings and stealing the money in order to make even more money in the long run.

The action of The Accountant is solid and entertaining. Gavin O’Connor is a talented director if not an auteur. O’Connor is a strong technician whose talent is well suited for a mainstream action blockbuster. The film is paced well and while the flashbacks providing Chris’s backstory linger a little too long, it pays off well and gives Chris a needed depth against Ben Affleck’s stony interpretation of an autistic genius. The fight scenes are a bit muddled in the final act, it’s often so dark you feel like you are missing something, but that’s mostly in the final act and not enough to detract from the good things about The Accountant.

I cannot speak to Ben Affleck’s performance as an autistic man. I am not autistic myself and neither is Affleck and if that alone makes the performance offensive, I cannot argue with you. I happen to like Affleck a great deal and I find him compelling here, even as his movie star wit is completely absent. This is a far different Ben Affleck than we’ve ever seen on screen before and I found that appealing. But, here again, I will not argue with anyone who tells me that this performance is offensive or, at the very least, an oversimplified, predictable bit of autistic burlesque.

Why is Anna Kendrick in The Accountant? I have no idea. Anyone could have played this role. Anna does her best with limited screen time and no good material. She’s still a movie star and thus she stands out regardless of the material she’s stuck with, but yeah, she’s got nothing to do here beyond being a possible love interest and providing a sounding board for exposition or an inspiration for a flashback in Christian’s memories. Anna Kendrick deserved better.

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