‘The Accountant’ Trailer: Ben Affleck Is an Assassin With a Beautiful Mind
Early details on The Accountant made the new film from Warrior director Gavin O’Connor sound like it was based on a graphic novel, even though it’s not: Ben Affleck stars as a white collar accountant who leads a double-life as a lethal assassin. So it wasn’t really surprising when WB announced plans to release a tie-in comic book for The Accountant. What is a bit surprising is the tone of the first trailer, which presents an intriguing and off-kilter drama about a man struggling with a vague mental disorder.
Set to the haunting (but maybe too on-the-nose) Radiohead track “Everything in Its Right Place,” the first trailer for The Accountant introduces us to Ben Affleck’s character, a man who was diagnosed with a developmental disorder at a young age — in short, he’s a socially inept math genius. Oh, and he has a room full of carefully organized weapons. No big deal.
Sure, it shares a couple of things in common with A Beautiful Mind (a math genius stares at a pane of glass covered in equations!), but the trailer doesn’t indicate that we’re looking at another piece of maudlin awards bait. It actually sort of calls to mind Unbreakable, in that this could be an unconventional superhero origin story of sorts — hence the comic book tie-in?
Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) is a math savant with more affinity for numbers than people. Behind the cover of a small-town CPA office, he works as a freelance accountant for some of the world’s most dangerous criminal organizations. With the Treasury Department’s Crime Enforcement Division, run by Ray King (J.K. Simmons), starting to close in, Christian takes on a legitimate client: a state-of-the-art robotics company where an accounting clerk (Anna Kendrick) has discovered a discrepancy involving millions of dollars. But as Christian uncooks the books and gets closer to the truth, it is the body count that starts to rise.
Co-starring Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Tambor and John Lithgow, The Accountant hits theaters on October 14.