This Week's Review: The Accountant

After playing Batman in two movies, Ben Affleck has chosen to play the CPA of steel who, in his civilian identity, saves farm families from the evil villains of the IRS by finding overlooked deductions; in his free time, he infiltrates drug cartels, terrorist groups, and other anti-social groups, straightens out their accounting problems, and then gives useful (and anonymous) tips to the Treasury; when he’s not doing that, he spends his time ducking some very hostile assassins paid by those whom he has inconvenienced. In other words, The Accountant is an action film with a surfeit of violence and very little information about how to read a balance sheet.

Any good action hero has an Achilles heel, be it Kryptonite or the color yellow; our hero suffers from an extreme form of autism that makes him extremely shy and very, very obsessive;  there are flashbacks throughout the film, most of which turn out to be very pertinent.

The trailers have been very misleading by implying that the plot would be about his work against international thugs; instead, the plot seemingly revolves around a small manufacturer of prosthetics who has cash flow problems.  When the latest team of assassins tries to stop the investigation, we know something is very, very rotten.  To complicate things, the Treasury thinks our hero is one of the villains; J. K. Simmons plays the Treasury agent who has personal reasons for trying to identify the unknown accountant.

I can not identify any source for this story, but it has all the trappings of a super-hero origin story.  I will not be surprised if there is a sequel (or two, or three…).  The film is entertaining, but CPA candidates would probably be better off studying their textbooks.