Accountant - 3 1/2 smiles

I really liked "The Accountant," starring Ben Affleck, an off-beat thriller featuring a math whiz with autism. Affleck, a two-time Oscar winner, plays Christian Wolff, a shy, soft-spoken accountant. He has a strip-malloffice where he helps ordinary folks get great tax refunds from the IRS. But Wolff isn't your run-of-the-mill CPA. He does most of his number wizardry for some of the world's most dangerous cartel bosses, warlords, terrorists and corporate crooks. He washes their dirty money and avoids getting assassinated by his psychotic employers who worry that he knows too much about their business. That's because Wolff is an assassin in his own right, a crack shot who uses military-grade sniper rifles like most use water pistols. Plus, he's one of the world's top practitioners of pentjak silat, a deadly, lightening fast martial arts discipline from Indonesia. Oh, he also has an expensive art collection.

Working from a clever jigsaw puzzle of a script by Bill Dubuque, director Gavin O'Connor jumps back and forth from the present to Christian's childhood, with Seth Lee playing young Christian. We learn how Christian was molded into a fighting machine he's become. Anna Kendrick's Dana Cummings, a talented accountant at a bio-medical robotics firm, notices a serious discrepancy in the books, which causes the head of the firm (John Lithgow) to bring in Christian to go through 15 years of ledgers. Dana recognizes something of herself in the outsider Christian, and he develops a fondness for her. Jon Bernthal, a wisecracking assassin named Braxton, seems destined to cross paths with Christian and Jeffrey Tambor is effective as a convicted mob accountant who mentors Christian in prison. An always top-notch J.K. Simmons is the head of the Treasury Department's Crime Enforcement Division, who has been trying to learn the true identity of The Accountant for the last decade. "The Accountant" works best when Christian is outsmarting the bad guys and proving that super heroes don't need to wear capes and masks. (A little irony here, since Affleck also plays Batman in the new DC Comics reboot.) This is an immensely satisfying movie and here's hoping for a sequel.