Two valuable professions are often the butt of jokes: dentists and accountants.  Dentists, perhaps, because they are often considered without a great sense of humor.  But that changed when the dentist played by Steve Martin in Roger Corman’s “The Little Shop of Horrors” hit the screen. Accountants because they are considered straight-laced, serious, wrapped up in numbers and probably introverted.  But that will change when people see “The Accountant.” Its director, Gavin O’Connor, has already afforded us movies like “Pride and Glory” about a police corruption scandal, making “The Accountant” right up the director’s alley.

As for how this picture will change your mind about accountants—though maybe not about the folks at H&R Block—Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) is a CPA who probably has a Blackburn belt in Indonesian martial arts and uses this physical training, which is as adept as his talent for numbers.  With Bill Dubuque’s screenplay, director O’Connor flips backwards and forward from Wolff’s childhood to his present offices.  That’s not the problem.  It works.  The difficulties arise when too many plot points are thrown in.

As a child, Wolff has Asperger’s Syndrome, which makes him perform unnecessary moves with his hands and sets him off screaming when a piece of his jigsaw puzzle is missing.  His father refuses to send him free to a summer program that would work on him, instead committing him as well as his more normal brother Brax (Jon Bernthal) to martial arts lessons. The training would presumably help Christian as he grows up and is picked on by bullies.  But even his father never foresaw the kinds of bullies he would meet, nor did dad realize that his Asperger’s son would become a sharpshooter using a rifle with telescopic sight and some smaller firepower.

After cooking the books for some dangerous, mafia characters, he along Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), is hired by Lamar Blackburn at a seemingly legitimate corporation that does good for people with missing limbs by providing them with robotic parts.  When Cummings discovers a discrepancy in the books amounting to over $60 million and forwards an inquiry to Wolff, Wolff fills up a roomful of glass boards with numbers, being the math savant that he is.  This puts him into conflict with Blackburn, who instructs an army of goons to waste the two of them lest their discovery be forwarded to Ray King (J.K. Simmons), a Treasury Department official, who has enlisted the expertise of Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to nail Wolff.

There is a romantic interest in the story, one involving Wolff and Cummings, but since Wolff has difficulty in social situations, nothing much comes of it.  The plot alternates intellectual discussion with physical violence—the latter becoming like a free-for-all video-game shooting gallery, thereby undermining the integrity of the story and forcing it to the level of Marvel Comics.  The interplay of the heady with the violent makes the picture seem like two movies in one, but even without the dichotomy, the film is an overlong, furiously labyrinthine drama.

Rated R.  128 minutes.  © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

Story – C-
Acting – C+
Technical – B
Overall – C