How Did ‘The Accountant’ Become Ben Affleck’s Biggest Movie of the Past Decade?

Ben Affleck had a busy year in 2016, affirming his then-status as a key member of the Warner Bros. stable by starring in three different big-budget movies for the studio. At the beginning of the year, he made his debut as Batman in the then-nascent DCEU, for the splashy mano-a-mano Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. At the end of the year, he released his directorial follow-up to the Oscar-winning Argo, the gangster epic and presumed passion project Live By Night. So it’s strange, in retrospect, that Affleck’s most beloved and lasting project of that year would turn out to be the unassuming middle child sandwiched between the two, a thriller called The Accountant. Even with multiple years to adjust, the studio itself seemed confused by the movie’s success; a belated sequel was recently set up (and quickly commenced filming) with Amazon MGM, having purchased the rights from an apparently still-baffled Warner.

The Accountant 2: The Auditing does seem like an odd choice for a semi-belated sequel; presuming the movie hits in 2025, it’ll be arriving eight and a half, maybe nine years after its predecessor, making it not quite a legacy sequel but not exactly a timely follow-up either. This fits the original movie’s own hybridization. It comes on a bit like a throwback to ’90s white-collar thrillers, like the spate of John Grisham adaptations that were so big for much of the decade: Not quite crime pictures, not exactly legal dramas, and well short of (in the parlance of the time) Bruckheimer-level action or mayhem. But The Accountant is also something of an action movie, albeit not quite (in the parlance of today) at a John Wick level of style or intensity. Despite working from an original screenplay by Bill Dubuque, it has the slightly grim, pulpy airport-novel plotting of a Jack Reacher thriller, and in fact unofficially scooped Tom Cruise’s big-screen Reacher sequel, Never Go Back, when it became such a hit in fall 2016.

Affleck plays Christian Wolff, an autistic CPA who works to “un-cook” the books of companies with varying degrees of shadiness. The main story follows Christian as he’s hired to reconcile a discrepancy at a robotics company, initially discovered by company accountant Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick). This eventually incurs the wrath of mysterious enemies, who send assassins after Christian and Dana to silence them – not realizing Christian is a formidable fighter and killer in his own right. Simple enough, until the movie distinguishes itself, for good and for ill, by absolutely packing itself with backstory: We learn about Christian’s childhood autism; his military father who trained him to adjust to uncomfortable stimuli and also threw in some bonus deadly martial arts; the reasons for his imprisonment, where he learned about money laundering and also more about reading social cues from an entirely separate father figure; and his connection to a treasury agent played by J.K. Simmons, who fills in some (but not all) of this information via a movie-stopping monologue. It’s the most screenwriter-y movie imaginable: Almost everyone in it gets a little monologue explaining an incident from their past that inspired lifelong motivations,

Also quite screenwriterly in the bad way: Like so many movies before it, The Accountant treats autism as kind of a pulpy novelty act that gives Christian superhuman (or is it post-human?) properties. It’s not especially smart or respectful, but then, the movie feels easily wowed by any displays of even the most basic expertise: In an early scene, Christian displays what is presented as encyclopedic understanding of accounting loopholes but is actually just something almost any CPA would tell a freelancer. (If you work out of your home, you can deduct some of your home expenses on your taxes! His mind!) The film also seems genuinely awed by Christian’s capacity for no-fuss, seemingly guilt-free executions. When, towards the end of the film, the director of an autism facility tells a family that “maybe your son’s capable of much more than you know,” the movie is implying, “…like Christan Wolff. (Which means he’s also kinda talking about murder.)

In some ways, The Accountant boils Affleck to a kind of essence: stolid, square-jawed, white collar, suit-and-tie job. But it’s not exactly an archetypal Affleck performance, either, for a performer who tends to fare best with at least a glimmer of self-deprecating humor, or tapping into a faint strain of sadness – something he did in Accountant director Gavin O’Connor’s alcoholism drama The Way Back. Here, he gets to do furiously complicated math on a board, like a parody of his buddy Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, and execute brutal martial-arts moves, like Damon in The Bourne Identity. Given the lore that that movie originally had an espionage-related thriller-ish subplot where Will is recruited by the government, The Accountant almost plays like a nightmare scenario of how a humanist drama could be overwritten into a pulpy mess. It’s like Affleck is absorbing bad decisions Damon never quite made. (Meanwhile, noted film scholar John Mayer theorizes that The Accountant is secretly a Batman movie.)

Yet there is something compelling about The Accountant that’s made it a streaming favorite, bouncing around services over the past few years. (It arrives on Netflix today, and will almost certainly occupy a spot in the Netflix Top 10 by this time tomorrow.) With the benefit of hindsight over its continued popularity, the movie feels like a bridge between a vintage TNT-era cable rewatch thriller and the Netflix era of movies competing for attention in an endless scroll. The Accountant has an all-star cast that gives it an advantage in the latter battle for eyeballs: Affleck, Kendrick, Simmons, plus John Lithgow and Jon Bernthal. That they’re acting out a family drama or a corporate-malfeasance thriller or a brutal action movie or a chaste sort-of love story, depending on which scene you land on, makes the movie well-designed for old-fashioned channel-flipping, too. The simpler version of The Accountant might make more sense, might work better as a straightforward action thriller, and might not repeatedly stop the movie cold for monologues in desperate need of more Burn After Reading energy from Simmons. (“What did we learn, Palmer? I guess we learned not to do it again.”) But maybe it wouldn’t have survived almost a decade as a streaming fashion. In movie-prodigy fashion, it’s like The Accountant discovered the algorithm before it existed.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Watch The Accountant on Netflix