It’s about to get calculated and then offset against expenses in this bitch!

When you hear that an action packed film called the Accountant is heading to our shores, it doesn’t really set your senses alight with any anticipation.

After all, when the word accountant is mentioned, you can’t help but be stuck with the image of a balding 45 year old called Gerald who dresses in a grey suit he had from the 80s, who generally just wants to chat to Gillian in the coffee room, because she knows about knitting. His favourite colour tends to be beige, because pretty much that describes his personality to a tee. Or perhaps that’s just me thinking that?

However, this particular cinematic adventure doesn’t delve into that world too much and in fact you may end up coming out the other end of not wanting to annoy any accountants for fear that they happen to own an arsenal of weaponry that rivals Seal Team 6. Ben Affleck plays a chap called Christian Wolff, who does wonderful things with numbers but is autistic and therefore struggles with things at times, unless he’s able to finish. Make up your own jokes there folks…..

He’s an accountant who not only helps a lovely couple on a farm get more write offs on their tax receipts by saying what’s being used for a company purpose, he just happens to also do the books for some very unsavory people all over the world and is highly paid for it. This gets the attention of the US treasury department and Ray King (JK Simmons) blackmails an agent (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to get the case resolved, otherwise she goes to prison. Why? F*ck knows at this point but it happens anyway!

And as you can see here, this is how I worked out the ratio of mayo to chicken in my sandwich…..

Anna Kendrick turns up as someone who notices something bad in a tech firm’s books, and Ben is hired to see where the issue is, which once discovered, leads us down a path of course, of lies, treachery and deceit. We see several scenes with Jon Bernthal (Walking Dead, Daredevil) as someone who appears to be a fixer, making people do various things for a third party we see later, and at first it’s all seemingly separate, but over the course of the film it all comes together very well.

We also get a lot of flashbacks over the course of the film as we find out how ol’ Ben became the lean mean killing calculating machine he is today, along with his brother. This actually does lead somewhere later in the film, so really it was quite clever. The story also takes a few turns here and there, some of which you figure and then some come out of nowhere, yet afterwards does make sense.

It’s actually interesting to see how autism and mental health is shown in this film, with Ben Affleck actually coming across rather way when he’s portraying someone struggling to deal with things he doesn’t understand. He has his routine, he tries to hang on to a certain time for his medication when he’s struggling to cope it seems at the end of the day. Yet he’s also quite likable and honestly it’s hard not to root for him in the end. There is enough set-up for a sequel of course as the norm in most films these days, but also enough that you do actually get a complete story in this film alone, so you don’t feel hard done by.

So would I recommend this to see, actually I would. This turned out to be very entertaining with a few nice twists (a couple you do see coming, some you don’t), an excellent cast and the humour I didn’t imagine being subtle in some cases or indeed being present either.