{"id":163253,"date":"2016-10-18T06:00:34","date_gmt":"2016-10-18T13:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shockya.com\/news\/?p=163253"},"modified":"2016-10-17T06:35:54","modified_gmt":"2016-10-17T13:35:54","slug":"the-accountant-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shockya.com\/news\/2016\/10\/18\/the-accountant-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"The Accountant Movie Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE ACCOUNTANT<<\/a>\/strong>
\nWarner Bros<\/strong>
\nReviewed by: Harvey Karten, Shockya<\/strong>
\nGrade: C<\/strong>
\nDirector:\u00a0 Gavin O\u2019Connor<\/strong>
\nWritten by: Bill Dubuque<\/strong>
\nCast: Ben Affleck<\/a>, Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons<\/a>, Jon Bernthal, Jean Smart, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Jeffrey Tambor, John Lithgow<\/strong>
\nScreened at: Warner, NYC, 10\/1\/16<\/strong>
\nOpens: October 14, 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n

Two valuable professions are often the butt of jokes: dentists and accountants.\u00a0 Dentists, perhaps, because they are often considered without a great sense of humor.\u00a0 But that changed when the dentist played by Steve Martin in Roger Corman\u2019s \u201cThe Little Shop of Horrors\u201d hit the screen. Accountants because they are considered straight-laced, serious, wrapped up in numbers and probably introverted.\u00a0 But that will change when people see \u201cThe Accountant.\u201d Its director, Gavin O\u2019Connor, has already afforded us movies like \u201cPride and Glory\u201d about a police corruption scandal, making \u201cThe Accountant\u201d right up the director\u2019s alley.<\/p>\n

As for how this picture will change your mind about accountants\u2014though maybe not about the folks at H&R Block\u2014Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) is a CPA who probably has a Blackburn belt in Indonesian martial arts and uses this physical training, which is as adept as his talent for numbers.\u00a0 With Bill Dubuque\u2019s screenplay, director O\u2019Connor flips backwards and forward from Wolff\u2019s childhood to his present offices.\u00a0 That\u2019s not the problem.\u00a0 It works.\u00a0 The difficulties arise when too many plot points are thrown in.<\/p>\n

As a child, Wolff has Asperger\u2019s Syndrome, which makes him perform unnecessary moves with his hands and sets him off screaming when a piece of his jigsaw puzzle is missing.\u00a0 His father refuses to send him free to a summer program that would work on him, instead committing him as well as his more normal brother Brax (Jon Bernthal) to martial arts lessons. The training would presumably help Christian as he grows up and is picked on by bullies.\u00a0 But even his father never foresaw the kinds of bullies he would meet, nor did dad realize that his Asperger\u2019s son would become a sharpshooter using a rifle with telescopic sight and some smaller firepower.<\/p>\n

After cooking the books for some dangerous, mafia characters, he along Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), is hired by Lamar Blackburn at a seemingly legitimate corporation that does good for people with missing limbs by providing them with robotic parts.\u00a0 When Cummings discovers a discrepancy in the books amounting to over $60 million and forwards an inquiry to Wolff, Wolff fills up a roomful of glass boards with numbers, being the math savant that he is.\u00a0 This puts him into conflict with Blackburn, who instructs an army of goons to waste the two of them lest their discovery be forwarded to Ray King (J.K. Simmons), a Treasury Department official, who has enlisted the expertise of Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to nail Wolff.<\/p>\n

There is a romantic interest in the story, one involving Wolff and Cummings, but since Wolff has difficulty in social situations, nothing much comes of it.\u00a0 The plot alternates intellectual discussion with physical violence\u2014the latter becoming like a free-for-all video-game shooting gallery, thereby undermining the integrity of the story and forcing it to the level of Marvel Comics.\u00a0 The interplay of the heady with the violent makes the picture seem like two movies in one, but even without the dichotomy, the film is an overlong, furiously labyrinthine drama.<\/p>\n

Rated R.\u00a0 128 minutes.\u00a0 \u00a9 Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online<\/strong><\/p>\n

Story \u2013 C-<\/strong>
\nActing \u2013 C+<\/strong>
\nTechnical \u2013 B<\/strong>
\nOverall – C<\/strong><\/p>\n

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