"The Accountant": one-paragraph review

Anna Kendrick as Dana Cummings and Ben Affleck as Christian Wolff

[WARNING: major spoilers.]

2016's "The Accountant" is an action movie directed by Gavin O'Connor and starring Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, JK Simmons, Anna Kendrick, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Jeffrey Tambor, and John Lithgow. The story focuses on Christian Wolff (Affleck), the autistic son of a military dad who has his sons trained in pencak silat (a kinetic Indonesian martial art type seen in the Raid movies), partly as a way of coping with living abroad as military brats, and partly to help Christian cope with the overstimulation that affects autistic people. Christian grows up, joins the army like his dad, and is a savant with numbers. He becomes an accountant with a dossier of normal clients, plus side work as the numbers guy for some of the world's worst criminal organizations. He occasionally feeds information about these organizations to US Treasury Agent Raymond King (Simmons), who is retiring soon and looking to his protégée Marybeth Medina (Addai-Robinson) to replace him. Christian is hired to do accountancy work by Lamar Blackburn (Lithgow) of Living Robotics, a corporation that makes cybernetic technology to help the disabled. While at Living Robotics, Wolff meets young assistant Dana Cummings (Kendrick); together they discover a pattern of malfeasance in the company that leads to the death of company CFO Ed Chilton (Andy Umberger). Wolff also discovers that he and Dana have been targeted as well, but he uses his military and martial-arts training to kill the assassins sent after him as he continues to dig deeper into the mystery of Living Robotics. Meanwhile, it turns out that Blackburn himself is behind all of the shadiness, and he's hired a mercenary team to guard him while Wolff prepares an all-out assault against Blackburn. The movie's huge twist is that the leader of the mercenaries is none other than Christian's brother Braxton (Bernthal), estranged from Christian after an incident in which the brothers' father was killed at his ex-wife's funeral. Except for the autism angle—with Christian being socially awkward, direct, and unintentionally rude thanks to his being on the spectrum—and the final-reel resolution of one or two other mysteries, "The Accountant" is a typical action movie. I saw this movie because "The Accountant 2" just came out after an eight-year hiatus, and it looked like a fun take on a buddy-cop film, with autistic Christian and his "neurotypical" (i.e., normal) brother Braxton having adventures together. So I see "The Accountant"—which apparently has a cult following despite not being the most stellar work of cinema I've ever seen—mainly as a kind of prologue to this latest film. I think "The Accountant" is fine in a turn-your-brain-off kind of way; the writing could have been better, and from what I understand, the movie's portrayal of autism isn't particularly accurate. Despite these flaws, the movie certainly qualifies as good enough. Go see it if you haven't already.