Green Goblin Reviews: the Accountant

So, the Accountant is a bit of a troublesome beast to tackle. While I try my best to go into a film fresh, I’ve heard numerous critics murmur worryingly about Ben Affleck’s titular character and whether or not the film will promote a negative depiction of autism, as to associate being on the spectrum as some kind of superpower (like Rain Man meets John Wick).  And while I can understand this caution, these very same critics seem to not have much experience with autism to verify whether or not the film does the condition any justice.  Respectable.  Best not to talk out of your ass about something you don’t understand.  But, if you were wondering, I DO have some experience with it.

My little brother is a low-functioning non-verbal autistic.  With my upbringing, I’ve been around special needs children and adults all over the spectrum for my entire life.  And I can confirm that the filmmakers seem to have done their homework pretty damn well.  You can see Ben Affleck is trying his hardest to do this performance justice.  The rocking back and forth as a stress reliever, the obsession with the sense of touch.  The rigid fixation on routine (and inability to socially adjust to change).  The flashback scenes in particular hit home pretty hard and show how a family can cope or fall apart after getting the diagnosis of autism.  Honestly, I felt a bit of “there buy by the grace of God, goes I” as I sat in the theater.  And they (thank God) didn’t make the reason why he’s so good at fighting or killing be his autism.  Using a mental handicap as a superpower is……problematic in the best of situations.  So that bullet has been dodged.  Instead, you’re introduced to one Christian Wolff: The autistic son of a military man who instead of working with a facility designed to go at the child’s own pace to integrate them into society decides to go into full-on “Stick from Daredevil” territory and turn BOTH his sons (Wolff’s younger brother, Braxton) into the civilian equivalent of child soldiers.  So he became an expert marksman and hand-to-hand specialist in the same way that others do; by practicing his ass off.  It’s his number-crunching skills and obsession with mathematics that gets explained away by the autism.  The character is a literal accountant whose skills are so sought after, that he’s typically hired by terrorist organizations and domestic organized crime to track down missing money (since they obviously can’t involve government auditing), as a sort of neutral party that would be perfect in a comic book scenario (see “The Tailor” in Marvel or “The Carpenter” in DC).  So it’s Rain Man territory with the autistic savant scenario, who can defend himself like Liam Neeson in literally all of his recent filmography.  A bit cliched (and not a proper representation, collectively), but survivable.  So congratulations, film.  You managed to capture some spectrum of autism without offending anyone.  Now, all you’ve gotta do is make a coherent plot around this scenario, and this will be a slam dunk!!

……..oh…..

….oh, man.

Yeeeeeaaahhhh……sorry, folks.  Though this film goes out of its way to try and do autism justice (and hey, more power to them for that), it’s also a film that needed to spend a LOT more time with an editor.  There are entire plot points that go nowhere, scenes that drag on forever, and when the action set-pieces start kicking off, you’re hit with a feeling of “shouldn’t this have happened at the end of the FIRST act?!”  There are some legitimately good scenes, but you need to sift through the chaff to find it, while some other scenes that may have been designed to be poignant, come off as just silly (though, not in a cruel way at least).  The biggest problem this film suffers from is that it’s a long boil. And I mean a looooooong boil.  Like “holding a Zippo underneath a pot” scenario.  And this would be fine, if the characters leading up to this had anything important to say.  But most of the time, they do not.  There’s an entire B storyline involving the feds attempting to locate Wolff that just goes absolutely nowhere.  Oh yeah.  “Christian Wolff” isn’t his actual name.  He’s changed his identity every few years to avoid detection an has a read-to-move escape trailer with all of his most prized possessions ready to go a moment’s notice, should he need to disappear.  That in and of itself isn’t a bad thing to have to set up, but the perspective of the police themselves is completely unnecessary (and requires the addition to a “Charlie’s Angel” style anonymous caller to have the entire thing make any kind of sense, story-wise) and brings the pacing down to a crawl.  A few throwaway lines and maybe a single scene with cops attempting to (and failing to) locate him would have sped this up immensely.  And there’s a third act twist that’s telegraphed about an hour back so ham-fisted, that Stevie Wonder could’ve seen it coming.  It’s a fairly forgivable twist, though you may find yourself going “lol, c’mon.  Seriously?” just a bit.

I know it sounds like I’m ragging on this film a lot, but I must admit that it’s still watchable.  Not anything that I’d rush out to the theaters to see, but not so terrible as to have me condemn the finished product.  Instead, this is a movie that I would LOVE to see an amateur editor take to and see if they could maybe make the whole damn thing a bit more coherent.  If anything, it’s worth watching just to see why an editor is still a necessity in film-making (in case, DC’s films had made you forget).

5/10.  You can do worse, but you can still do better.  Set your expectations accordingly, folks.

Tags: Accountant, Ben Affleck, Review, The Accountant