Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

The Accountant Blu-ray Movie Review

Christian: The Professional

Reviewed by Michael Reuben January 14, 2017

There's an early scene in Warner's high-concept thriller, The Accountant, that is emblematic of the entire film. As an autistic boy intently assembles a jigsaw puzzle, he becomes loudly unhinged when he cannot complete the task because a puzzle piece has fallen to the floor out of his sight. Director Gavin O'Connor's film scatters an array of plot fragments across its two-hour running time, and you hold your breath waiting to see whether O'Connor (Pride and Glory) and screenwriter Bill Dubuque (The Judge) will ultimately supply every last piece necessary to complete the picture. When everything finally does snap into place, there's a palpable sense of relief that The Accountant actually fits together.

The accountant of the title goes by the name of Christian "Chris" Wolff (Ben Affleck), although it turns out that he also uses other names, deliberately obscuring his true identity. In flashbacks, we see Chris as a boy diagnosed with autism, who, along with his silent younger brother, is given a brutal and unorthodox education in combat and weaponry by his military father (Robert C. Treveiler). The children's sympathetic mother (Mary Kraft) would prefer treatment at a center run by a kindly neurologist (Jason Davis), but she is overruled. In the present, we see the adult that Chris has become: a solitary, self-contained individual who holds his tics to a minimum and wears a mask of near-normalcy, as he conducts what appears to be a small-time accounting practice from a strip mall storefront in Plainfield, Illinois. (There's much more to Chris's biography, but to reveal it would spoil the fun.)

Chris's facility with complex numerical data has gained him a reputation as a top financial investigator who is available for special assignments. High-profile clients contact him through an anonymous female handler whose only identifying characteristic is the clipped British accent with which she speaks to Chris over a secure telephone line. His latest project is a forensic audit of Living Robotics, a successful tech enterprise that is about to go public, except that a junior member of the accounting department, Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), has discovered a troubling discrepancy. While the chief financial officer (Andy Umberger) resents an outsider's intrusion, Chris is granted full access to the company's records by its founder and CEO, Lamar Blackburn (John Lithgow), and Lamar's sister and partner, Rita (Jean Smart).

Meanwhile, another side to Chris's professional life has caught the attention of a senior Treasury official, Ray King (J.K. Simmons, who has the film's trickiest role and performs it with his customary aplomb). After repeatedly spotting Chris in surveillance photos of the world's most notorious criminals and terrorists, King dragoons a promising young data analyst, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), into identifying and tracking down this mysterious figure. He gives his impending retirement as an excuse for the urgency of the assignment, but there's obviously more to it.

The final set of moving parts in this elaborate machine is an anonymous enforcer-for-hire (Jon Bernthal), who commands an impressively armed band of mercenaries offering whatever degree of violence his client may require. When Chris's investigation of Living Robotics threatens to uncover a complex fraudulent scheme, the anonymous enforcer is hired to shut down the investigation, only to discover that this particular accountant has a lethal skill set that one would never expect from a guy with a pocket protector.

To director O'Connor's credit, he keeps these plates (and many more) aloft and spinning, no matter how wacky The Accountant becomes. He is aided by a first-rate cast that is able to provide the illusion of humanity to characters who are little more than cardboard cutouts, and he cannily exploits small details—including Chris's numerous rituals and Dana's history as an art student—to distract viewers from the story's many improbabilities. Dubuque's script provides the requisite twists and reveals that contemporary audiences have come to expect, but they're not arbitrarily pulled from thin air. The Accountant plays fair with the viewer. When you get to the end, you can look back and spot the clues to the film's central riddles that were hiding in plain sight, much like Chris Wolff himself.

The Accountant Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Accountant was shot on film by Irish cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (The Avengers), with post-production completed on a digital intermediate at 2K. Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray delivers the high quality of presentation that one would expect from a contemporary digital source, with superior sharpness and clarity and an absence of noise or interference. The film's palette favors cool and neutral colors, which is presumably intended to reflect the emotional detachment of the film's titular hero, who has a closet full of identical dark suits and is often shown isolated and framed by a rectangular fixture such as a door or window. The flashbacks to Christian's childhood feature warmer tones and have been given a slight softness to distinguish them from the present. Blacks are solid and deep, detail is plentiful, and a minutely fine grain pattern can still be discerned, despite the DI processing. Warner has given The Acccountant a capable encode with an average bitrate of 27.89 Mbps, which continues the theatrical group's trend toward less aggressive compression.

The Accountant Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Accountant arrives with a choice between 5.1 and 7.1 soundtracks, both encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA. Both tracks are excellent, but be prepared for a film that relies much more heavily on dialogue than action. The Accountant assembles its pieces through numerous scenes of character interaction, which are set in a wide variety of environments that the soundtrack meticulously re-creates without calling too much attention to its presence. Occasionally, the soundtrack enters Chris's head, and we hear remembered events mixing with the present or his thought processes pinging back and forth (the latter is particularly impressive in 7.1). The single most memorable effect is the deep, echoing boom of the Barrett M82A1M sniper rifle that is Chris's weapon of choice. In a climactic showdown between Chris and a houseful of bad guys, the alternation among pistols, automatic weapons and the Barrett's distinctive roar provides an organized cacophony that bounces back and forth through the viewing room. Dialogue is intelligible, well-positioned and properly prioritized. The brooding, ominous score is by the prolific Mark Isham, who previously scored Warrior for director O'Connor.

The Accountant Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Inside the Man (1080p; 1.78:1; 10:38): Affleck, O'Connor, Dubuque and assorted members of the cast and crew discuss the character of Christian Wolff.



• Behavioral Sciene (1080p; 1.78:1; 8:04): With contributions from Laurie Stephens, who is described as a Ph.D. and Director of Clinical Services for an organization called Education Spectrum, O'Connor et al. discuss the challenges of portraying an autistic character.



• The Accountant in Action (1080p; 1.78:1; 7:14): This featurette focuses on the film's stunts, with emphasis on Affleck's training for fight sequences.



• Introductory Trailers: At startup the disc plays trailers for Live by Night, Dunkirk, Suicide Squad and Sully, along with the now-familiar Warner promo for 4K UHD.

The Accountant Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As the title of this review suggests, The Accountant has elements in common with Luc Besson's Leon, of which the main character was also a misfit with an almost preternatural gift for combat and mayhem. But Besson used the action thriller format as a wrapper for an intimate character study, as his titular hero formed an unexpected bond with a young girl, whereas O'Connor's film never attempts to step outside genre conventions. Although it may lack a comic-book provenance, The Accountant fits comfortably within the superhero genre, with autism reclassified as a superpower and a mysterious hero with a secret identity and a troubled back story. What's perhaps most impressive about O'Connor's work here is how he manages to check all the superhero boxes and deliver an involving experience without the aid of expensive CGI or the need to level a city to create a sense of danger. On a production budget of just $40 million, he's crafted a more coherent and engaging narrative than any of Warner's DC films since the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy. Warner's Blu-ray treatment is solid and recommended.