The Accountant
BEN AFFLECK’S dull bookkeeping job turns deadly after the treasury rumbles his game
THRILLER Sky Premiere HD, 12.45pm & 8pm/sky Premiere+1, 1.45pm & 9pm Ben Affleck stars as a forensic accountant with a high-functioning form of autism who works for criminal organisations. See
ACTION THRILLER Friday, Sky Premiere HD, 12.45pm & 8pm 3
RAIN MAN MEETS Jason Bourne appears to be the premise of this action thriller starring Ben Affleck as an autistic savant who’s a whiz at maths and a dab hand at killing people too. Yet if you can handle the movie’s iffy basis and decidedly ludicrous plot then it does deliver entertaining shoot-’em-up thrills.
Affleck’s solitary Christian Wolff is on the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, and he has found a niche occupation to suit his skills and limitations. A forensic accountant with a rather specialised clientele, he works for drug cartels, arms dealers, money launderers and the Mob. If anyone has been cooking the crooks’ books, he’s the man who will find out. He moves in dangerous circles, so it’s handy that he doesn’t just crunch numbers. Put by his martinet military dad through a punishing regime of combat training during his childhood, he is a crack shot and a lethal unarmed fighter.
But with suspicious US treasury agents JK Simmons and Cynthia Addai-robinson working overtime to try to uncover his identity, he takes a rare legitimate job working for a robotics company, only for the gig to turn deadly after Anna Kendrick’s chipper accounts clerk discovers a multi-million-dollar hole in the firm’s books.
Of course, as plots go, none of this exactly stands up to forensic scrutiny, but the film’s flaws don’t detract from its incidental pleasures. Look out for the moments when Wolff blows on his fingertips: it’s the fussy obsessive-compulsive ritual he performs before he gets down to a task, whether that’s demolishing a plateful of neatly arranged bacon and eggs or a platoon of mercenary killers.