The figures don't add up for The Accountant

Anna Kendrick (l) and Ben Affleck (r)

Although he doesn't get the attention he deserves these days Paddy Chayefsky was a great screenwriter with three Oscars to prove it. But the man behind Network, The Hospital, Marty and so many others is a star in my book for identifying and naming the ‘rubber ducky’ moment.

This started as a private joke between Chayefsky and his good friend, the equally award-laden director, Sidney Lumet. They noted that oftentimes in bad movies there would be a lull in the action while a key character explained his back story. This was the point where the villain explained he was the way he was, and that he had strangled all those kittens, because his mother took away his rubber ducky when he was three.

While identifying the rubber ducky moment was a source of some amusement for Lumet and Chayefsky, you could spend a long time watching their films and trying to find one without success. Not so with The Accountant.

The whole third act of this Ben Affleck thriller is one long rubber ducky moment thanks to J.K. Simmons – and trust me I am spoiling nothing by revealing this. In common with most rubber ducky speeches, it is long and heartfelt, in short, an actor’s gift – but entirely redundant. We shouldn’t need to be told the back story; it should be obvious from the actions and behaviour of the character. Not so in this picture.

It’s a shame because up till this point The Accountant had been a slow-moving but just about engaging thriller in which Affleck plays Christian Woolf, a man on the autistic spectrum who happens to be a whizz with figures. He is also deadly with a Bushmaster assault rifle; think Rain Man meets American Sniper.

Affleck has been living a double life. A childhood trauma sent him round the world to learn a series of skills from assorted experts; then he remembered he wasn’t Batman in this picture so he chose accountancy instead of crime-fighting. His autistic savant nature enabled him to forensically assess the accounts of some of the world’s dodgiest criminals so they could work out who was stealing from them. One assumes that, rather than carry their possessions out in a bin bag, the unfortunates that Affleck identified were themselves carried out in bin bags, but this moral consequence appears not to have occurred to anyone. Nonetheless when someone appears to be stealing from software tycoon John Lithgow he hires Affleck to do his thing.

Simmons meanwhile is the US Treasury official searching for this mysterious underworld accountant to the point where he pressures a young agent to find him or face having her guilty past revealed. Anna Kendrick is the young whistle-blower in Lithgow’s firm who is working with Affleck to reveal the thief.

There is also a mysterious thug played by Jon Bernthal who, despite his macho appearance, is a living, breathing rubber ducky all on his own.

The problem with The Accountant for me is that the story simply doesn’t hang together. There are four separate plots here which run in parallel and only come together because of the contrivance of Simmons’ rubber ducky speech. The final third of the film is completely at odds with the rest of the picture as it limps along to a fairly obvious conclusion.

An additional problem is Affleck's lack of charisma. I appreciate that this is a character trait here but it is very difficult for the audience to engage with a character whose raison d'etre is his insularity from the world. It is difficult to empathise with Affleck and therefore difficult to care what happens.

Director Gavin O’Connor takes a workmanlike approach but in those moments when the bullets stop flying you realise there is nothing to support the plot other than a bunch of recognisable but generally underused names. In short, it doesn’t really add up.