TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Review: 'The Accountant' a great balance of action, drama
Helmed by Gavin O’Connor, The Accountant offers a fresh look at a paradigm in which matters of cerebral conditions like autism soars brightly.
Change Size
A still from The Accountant. (Warner Bros./File)
H
elmed by Gavin O’Connor, The Accountant offers a fresh look at a paradigm in which matters of cerebral conditions like autism soars brightly. In the film, the main character Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) struggles with his identity as he discovers financial discrepancies in the company he works for, which leads to him pinpoint those who are the source of said irregularities.
The film moves at a relatively slow pace. It takes a while to identify each of the character’s true self, which, in a way, affirms Wolff's role in the center of the story. The film explores ideas of solitude, family and, at times, being fatherless. Even though it takes a while to uncloak, it successfully balances the past and the present with assassinations in its main plot and Wolff’s backstory as the subplot.
Wolff as a newly acquired accountant in the Living Robotics company is a character on the positive end of the spectrum. Later on, it is found that Wolff used to be a freelance accountant who “worked for drug cartels, arm brokers, money launderers, and assassin…” as stated by Raymond King (J. K. Simmons).
After extensive research, King along with Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Adai-Robinson) discovers that Wolff has been not only an accountant for many crime lords, but is also retrieving some American companies’ lost money by wiring ‘forgotten’ stashes of cash from his previous clientele.
Lamar Blackburn (John Lithgow), the CEO of Living Robotics, staggers in awe of Wolff’s daunting, conclusive findings, thus leading him to hire a man to assassinate an accounting clerk by the name of Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), who is the one who found financial discrepancies in the company.
(Read also: Review: Graceful adaptation of suspenseful 'Inferno')
O’Connor, who is best known for directing Warrior (2011), has definitely incorporated his signature style into the The Accountant, a piece that once again provides a great balance of action, thrills and drama.
Ultimately, the film explores mental disorders in a respectful manner through Wolff’s character, who shows that autistic people can tap into new forms of productivity if they know how to properly channel their emotions.
It is safe to say that the film is somewhat told through a “selfish” pair of eyes. Seamus McGarvey, the film’s cinematographer, delivered the frames greatly through Wolff’s perspective. Wolff being a ‘sufferer’ of high-functioning autism further reaffirms the film’s tunnel-vision way of carrying the story.
In terms of character development, Ben Affleck delivered a stunning performance by innocuously embodying Christian Wolff. His expressions of ‘facelessness’ and frantic gestures when disturbed are almost effortlessly executed. J. K. Simmons gave a great performance with his character of Raymond King, which almost resembles Commissioner James Gordon (DC Comics character), a character he will be portraying in the upcoming Justice League (2017) – a stoic, loving father of integrity who demands loyalty above all else.
Gavin O’Connor’s film is overall balanced despite its arbitrarily concluded ending. (fmn/kes)
