Calculated risk doesn’t pay off
The last time we saw Ben Affleck on the big screen, he was giving his dark and brooding Batman a second outing in a quickfire Suicide Squad cameo.
The Californian flexes his action muscles once again here – but not in the manner you’d expect.
He plays autistic maths expert Christian Wolff, who uncovers corruption and murder within his role as a freelance accountant for dangerous criminal organisations.
Coming from Gavin O’Connor, the director of Warrior and Pride and Glory, the anticipation is for some bruising combat and murky morals that could easily take place in the real world.
However, The Accountant makes for a dumb, dull watch across most of its too lengthy twohour-plus running time.
Writer Bill Dubuque’s only previous scripting experience was on 2014’s average legal drama The Judge and perhaps that explains why the story is so cluttered and convoluted.
It also takes a remarkably simplistic, flawed view of people with autism that ends with a complete contradiction on everything we’ve just sat and watched for the previous couple of hours.
That’s despite a committed performance from Affleck who never once resorts to grandstanding or overdoes the quirks; he’s no Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, but imbues his character with several layers that mean you never quite know which way he’ll turn next.
Anna Kendrick, on the other hand, plays junior accountant Dana like several other previous parts – particularly her turn in 2009’s Up in the Air.
She’s perfectly fine, but material as dodgy and laboured as this needed more from her and the likes of Oscar winner J.K. Simmons (Ray King), John Lithgow (Lamar Black) and ex-Walking Dead alumni Jon Bernthal (Brax) to lift it to higher levels.
The storyline is far too contrived for its own good and O’Connor fails miserably in trying to combine facts and figures with gunplay and shady conspiracies.
Affleck’s would-be hero is gifted more skills than the star’s real-life buddy Matt Damon’s amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne – all thanks to some barely glimpsed at training from his military father.
The ending is an insult too. Having spent the best part of two hours establishing a world engulfed in darkness, back-stabbing and even cold-blooded killings, O’Connor and Dubuque throw an unnecessary amount of sugar over their ill-fitting climax.
You expect an overabundance of schmaltz to close out a rom-com or Disney movie – not a tale of a self-preserving gun-toting mathematician.
Sadly another misfire for O’Connor, then, after the disappointing Jane Got a Gun.
He fails to build on the intriguing early premise and delivers a lifeless action-thriller that’s less than the sum of its parts.