The Accountant (2016)
Directed by Gavin O'Connor
As a math savant uncooks the books for a new client, the Treasury Department closes in on his activities and the body count starts to rise.
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33 films that influenced The Accountant
What critics say influenced The Accountant
In the ’80s, that odd-cool couple, the autistic and the math-savant, went on a road-trip as brothers became buddies again in Rain Man; in the ’00s, an autistic math-savant went Holmes with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; now, in The Accountant, a “high-functioning autistic” and math-savant meets the mafia . . .
El de Christian Wolff es un tipo de rol tan excéntrico y llamativo, tierno y letal a partes iguales –una suerte de cruce imposible entre el Dustin Hoffman de Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988) y el Jason Bourne de Matt Damon–, que está por encima de la propia película y es capaz de engullir al propio Affleck.
Simply think "Rain Man" mixed up (and that's certainly the correct term) with a lot of guns and no time to watch Judge Wapner.
“No, really,” they lean in, “it’s Rain Man meets the Bourne movies.”
Parents with autistic children will often complain that, thanks to films such as Rain Man, strangers expect their offspring to have superpowers.
“The Accountant” is a little bit “Rain Man,” a little bit “Good Will Hunting” and a little bit “John Wick.”
But wouldn’t you know it: The film works, and it works in large part because of Affleck, who has set aside his latter-day clout and directorial ambitions to star in what is fundamentally a respectable version of John Wick, a film in which Keanu Reeves set aside absolutely nothing just to remind us all that he’s more vital at 50 than most of us are at 30.
“The Accountant” is a little bit “Rain Man,” a little bit “Good Will Hunting” and a little bit “John Wick.”
The violence, meanwhile, is extreme and comic-booky (think John Wick with a tick), and the characters' lives all end up being far more intertwined than necessary.
Even the score boasts a strangely mathematical dimension (but then, most music does), building ominous, electronic momentum beneath the increasingly tense proceedings, which lead to the sort of “he’s coming for you” showdown that makes movies like “John Wick” so guiltlessly satisfying.
Because the world in John Wick is deliberately artificial, it's easier to buy the constant fighting in that film.
Think of it as “Rain Man”/”A Beautiful Mind” by way of “John Wick,” except far more dour and less delirious than that description implies.
He’s always been an inexpressive actor with a stiff demeanor, who might remind you of the cruel comment that Pauline Kael once made about Laurence Harvey: that he finally found a role he was capable of playing convincingly in “The Manchurian Candidate”—that of a “brainwashed zombie.”
With ledger-entry care we get into it one plodding record at a time, beginning with blurry images of a hitman taking out linguini-eating mobsters in a scene that’s reminiscent of the young Michael Corleone removing the family nuisance in “The Godfather.”
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El contable se acerca a una figura paradigmática dentro de la historia de las organizaciones criminales (mafias, cárteles, ciertas corporaciones): la del hombre de las finanzas, aquella que ofreció días de gloria a la realidad (Al Capone, en la memoria) y al cine (acérquense a Force of evil, de Abraham Polonsky, de 1948).
Add to that a profound ability at martial arts that would make even Jackie Chan proud, and you have the ingredients that make Affleck the perfect successor to Charles Bronson as the strong and silent killer in this type of film (remember the original The Mechanic?).
In any event, it certainly DOES succeed in being more “exciting,” say, than 1981’s “Rollover.”
In the wrong hands, the screenplay could have been as controversial as Brian De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill” was with the trans community.
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The boys' father, a career military man specializing in psychological warfare, believes in tough martial-arts love only slightly less punishing than what Jean-Claude Van Damme endured in "Bloodsport."
A suitable analogy might be the film that remains M. Night Shyamalan’s best, 2000’s all-but-forgotten superhero prologue “Unbreakable.”