There's more to Chris Wolff (Ben Affleck), a CPA, than meets the eye. He's autistic, but functions normally. He even offers his accounting services for criminal organizations. While Ray King (J.K. Simmons), head of the Treasury Department's Crime Enforcement Division, and chief investigator Marybeth (Cynthia Addal-Robinson) investigate him, he starts working as an accountant for a robotics company owned by Lamar Black (John Lithgow) to try to figure out, with the help of Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), why $61 million has gone missing from the company. The deeper Chris examines the company, the more he ends up putting his very own life at risk.

      If that plot synopsis above sounds convoluted to you, just wait until you find out the rest of it because that's just the beginning. The real problem with The Accountant is its overstuffed, uneven screenplay by Bill Dubuque who also wrote the equally messy, contrived courtroom drama, The Judge. Does this film want to be more of a character study or more of a thriller? With a more intellectually woven screenplay, it could been effective at both, but, as the plot progresses with more and more backstories/exposition, it becomes increasingly preposterous and dull. Once the action scenes set in, that's when The Accountant officially starts to lose its momentum and plausibility. Perhaps it wouldn't have been that big of an attraction at the box office if it were merely a dramatic character study with some brainy thriller elements thrown in---brainy (a.k.a. cerebral) films are hardly made in Hollywood nowadays. Let's face it: a warm, tender and thought-provoking drama like Good Will Hunting would probably never be able to get made easily today. By contrast, The Accountant is cold, shallow and silly. It's a squandered opportunity to tell a rich, engrossing and sophisticated character-driven story for adults.

      A better screenwriter could have integrated the action sequences and twists more organically without sacrificing any intelligence and plausibility. The third act in particular feels very lazy---you can actually feel the wheels of the screenplay turning---when characters make lengthy speeches to try to explain things and spoon-feed the audience. Even so, the third-act twists sink the film even further into implausibility and confusion---not that there's anything inherently wrong with being confused, but it doesn't have to come with more holes in the plot than there is in swiss cheese. To top it all off, The Accountant feels overlong at a running time of 2 hours and 8 minutes, which feels more like 3 hours.