09 October 2022

The Accountant: Autism as a Superpower

I'm really not sure how I came across this movie. I think it was because I was looking into the career of Jon Bernthal, but I could not swear to that. I certainly have not been aware of it before the past 4 or 5 months or so. Jon Bernthal, in case you didn't know, stared in the Netflix adaptation of Marvel's The Punisher as Frank Castle. He fit that role perfectly. He didn't do bad in The Accountant either, though he doesn't star in this film. I can recommend both.

I'm also not sure if people have seen this movie. It is rated fairly highly on IMDB, Metacritic, and Rotten Tomatoes. It also made a fair amount of money for something that isn't the adaptation of a Marvel or DC comic book. Well, I guess it's fair to say that given it's rather anemic budget, on the scale of modern film-making, it made a lot of money.

Imagine Rain Man crossed with The Bourne Identity, though that isn't quite right. That is sort of what you get with The Accountant. I liked it. Though there are people in my own family who will tell you have Asperger's Syndrome, so maybe I'm biased. (And do people really not know that Louis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was actually a mathematician named Charles Dodgson?)

Ben Affleck stars as the accountant, and he does a wonderful job. The budget was low for this movie, by modern standards. But then there are no computer graphics (or vanishingly few scenes that got any treatment), nothing blows up, there are not 100 car crashes, and for an action movie it is pretty focused on the psychological. Since it isn't a spectacle, involving crashing cars or helicopters, alien invasions, or whatever, they are forced to actually tell a story, and make the characters compelling.

As for the rest of the cast... J.K. Simmons is good in this, but then he usually is. John Lithgow is excellent as always. Cynthia Addai-Robinson is also excellent as a Treasury analyst tracking the accountant; I had only seen her in the Netflix adaptation of DC's Arrow (Which always should have been called The Green Arrow). Anna Kendrick (Pitch Perfect) was also good; she had a small part, though it is an important part of the story.

This is the trailer for the movie The Accountant.

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