The Accountant

I saw the movie The Accountant on Saturday night and I thought it was a pretty good action thriller; in fact, it was better than I was anticipating!  Ben Affleck is not my favorite actor but he does a good job with this character (the irony is not lost on me that this character is unable to express emotion).  Christian Wolff (Affleck) is autistic but he is a mathematical savant.  His father, an officer in the military, believes that the only way to protect him from being taken advantage of is to teach him to defend himself physically with various martial arts and with every type of weapon (shown through various flashbacks).  The adult Wolff is an accountant who has dealings with with a number of underworld crime organizations, legitimizing their accounts.  When an employee (Anna Kendrick) finds a discrepancy in the books at Living Robotics, a company about to be taken public, owners Lamar Blackburn (John Lithgow) and his sister Rita (Jean Smart) hire Wolff.  When he runs the numbers (in some great scenes involving him writing figures on all of the windows), he discovers that the error is in the millions and suddenly people in the company are killed by a mysterious assassin (Jon Bernthal).  Meanwhile, Raymond King (J.K. Simmons) and his associate (Cynthia Adai-Robinson) at the Treasury Department are trying to track Wolff down.  How he hides is extremely clever and the action sequences are fabulous.  There are some pretty big twists at the end (one of which I probably should have seen coming) that add to the intrigue.  My only complaint is that virtually every character has a long and complicated backstory and this is sometimes confusing because it requires a great deal of exposition.  Overall, this film is quite entertaining and I would highly recommend it.