The Accountant

The sequel to your favorite violent accountant movie is happening.

It’s about time.

(Pictured above: Us trying to figure out how this happened.)

I kind of liked The Accountant. It was goofy, sure, but it had a kind of absurd purity as well. It “has a bit more interesting stuff creeping around its edges than a lot of the superhero movies based on established properties,” I wrote in my review for ScreenCrush. The mythology was engrossing, and the action scenes were surprisingly good. If The Accountant had come out 10 years ago, before I had kids and I gave up all my free time forever, I could easy envision a scenario where I watched it over and over on basic cable. It’s the perfect TNT movie.

The trend of more adult-oriented films commanding the box office continued this week with the success of The Accountant, which effortlessly snagged the number one spot. But like The Girl on the Train and The Magnificent Seven before it, Ben Affleck’s latest was strong without being enormous, meaning that word of mouth in the weeks ahead will prove vital to it being a proper hit.

Hollywood is so obsessed with superheroes these days they made a superhero movie about an accountant. It’s called The Accountant, and it is indeed about a guy who prepares people’s taxes, looks for deductions, and monitors financial records for fraud. But in his off-hours, this guy is also a master martial artist and a sniper capable of hitting targets a mile away. He also has a secret identity and what amounts to a low-rent Batcave, an Airstream trailer full of weapons and cash, stashed in a storage unit. He’s played by former Daredevil and current Batman Ben Affleck. He doesn’t wear a cape, but he might as well.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was a tale of two heroes and a tale of two outcomes. The film made $873 million worldwide. But it was also a deeply polarizing film, satisfying many hardcore DC fans but putting off others with its dark tone and heroes that I would characterize as, how should I put this, kinda dumb. It will lead directly into the Wonder Woman and Justice League movies, along with an entire DC Extended Universe, but the film was so dark and dour, that it made a lot of viewers less excited than nervous about all the stuff to come.

Y’know those back to school ads for Staples? The ones that repurpose the Christmas standard “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” to celebrate children going back class? I always hated those ads as a kid. Going back to school was not a time to celebrate. It was a time for grief and mourning.

Never underestimate the importance of the right song to your trailer. In the first trailer for The Accountant, we got our first glimpse at Ben Affleck’s killer set to the haunting dissonance of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place.” And while Britt may have been right — the track may have been just a little too on the nose — gosh darn it, the whole thing just worked. Now Warner Bros. is back with a brand new trailer that teases out a little more information about the title character but kept the Radiohead song. Everything in its right place, indeed.

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.