“The Accountant” – Two is the only number that matters.

On the Movie Fixers podcast, we have started a list of unforgivable sins, i.e. things that should never happen in movies. One of those things is not double-tapping an enemy. If you’ve seen a horror movie at any time in your life, you know what I’m talking about – the hero takes out the bad guy, but doesn’t hit/shoot/crush him again to ensure he is dead. Inevitably, that bad guy “comes back from the dead” to wreak more havoc. This does not happen in The Accountant. Ben Affleck (playing the title character), double-taps, and sometimes even triple-taps every bad guy in his wake. The best part is that my friend and I weren’t the only ones in the theater to cheer for this. I heard at least two other people literally say “double-tap” and I’m I could feel them fist bump from several seats away. It was glorious.

(SPOILERS coming, but they will be mild and few. You can count them if you like.)

But that’s not the only reason I liked The Accountant. It’s a pretty good action flick that makes the most boring profession on the planet (sorry, Dad) interesting. Affleck plays Chris Wolff, an autistic accountant who specializes in finding money. You read that right – autistic – and this isn’t solely to give Chris a quirk/superpower. It’s used to great effect to develop his character, comes into play with regards to at least one reveal, and makes you realize they are paralleling Leon in Leon: The Professional. Most of Chris’ clients are drug lords or weapons dealers or other uncouth characters, but he decides to take on a seemingly straight-laced job working for a robotics company helmed by Lamar Black (John Lithgow). One of their employees, Dana (Anna Kendrick), discovered some missing money during her accounting and Lamar brings Chris in to find it. After a night of going through the books, Chris has confirmed that money is indeed missing, but is shut down by the company before he can figure out where it went. And if anyone is going to be bothered by an unfinished money puzzle, it’s an autistic accountant.

The boring part.

The movie kicks into action gear as the people who know about the missing money start getting gunned down by Brax (Jon Bernthal) and some other hired mercenaries. I don’t need to tell you what happens for the rest of the movie because it should be fairly obvious. Action, action, and more action, completed with the missing pieces to the money puzzle. We also get treated with how an autistic accountant is also an insanely dangerous assassin and it’s very believable. I know – I was surprised as well.

As much fun as all of the action and mystery was, the movie has a secondary plot involving US Treasury agents Ray King (J.K. Simmons) and Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) trying to identify and track down the accountant (it’s more fun to call him that than Chris, which is why they refer to him like that so often in the movie). Unfortunately, this plotline is as pointless as the cops in Fargo and No Country for Old Men – the cops never really get close to catching their quarry. To be fair, in all these cases they are used to further develop the main characters or villains, but they end up never really mattering to the plot. They are basically us (the audience), but getting paid better. Simmons owns every scene he is in (because of course he does, the man kills it in insurance commercials), so the scenes are enjoyable. The problem is they bring the movie to a standstill and never advance the plot. I think the tension of the movie could have been ratcheted up had the agents actually gotten into it once or twice with the accountant. It could have been worse though, as Terminator: Genisys so aptly proved.

The not-boring part.

Before I go, I want to leave you with an observation and lack thereof. There’s a clever little reveal at the very end of the flick that I didn’t pick up on. My friend was surprised that I missed it and my reason was that because the conflict was over and the movie had been resolved, I had stopped thinking about the movie. It’s not a great reason, but there it is. However, he was still a little incredulous so I pointed out a clever little bit of filmmaking that he missed – early on when Chris first goes to the robotics company’s building, he is standing in front of a picture of a human hand touching fingers with a robotic hand. Chris is placed in front of the robot hand and Lamar is placed in front of the human hand. See? Clever. My point is that this movie definitely had some thought put into it and that’s why I think it was very good. That and the double-taps.

Rating: Ask for one dollar back for the Treasury agent’s scenes. They shouldn’t have been the most boring thing in a movie about an accountant.