The Accountant (2016)

This followup to 2016’s The Accountant opens in a bingo hall. Semi-retired deputy director of FinCen Raymond King (JK Simmons) pursues a case. He hopes Anais, an assassin, will help him find a missing Salvadoran boy, but she declines. King’s gunned down in the restroom, and when his protege Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) identifies the body, she spots a message scrawled on his forearm— ‘find the accountant.’The accountant in question is Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), who’s neurodivergent. We know this because at a dating event, he bores women with tax advice. He also places his breakfast foods in neat stacks and has no friends. He’s not close to his brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) either but having an assassin in the family is often useful.

In my Freshman year of high school, I played for the basketball team. We were absolutely terrible, as evident by my making the team. I remember one game we played ended with the final score being 68–8. And no, we were not the 68. I personally didn’t like to play basketball competitively; I just enjoyed hanging out with my friends and having fun after school.

Coach Jack Cunningham would probably not have liked having me on the team too much. Ben Affleck leads The Way Back, a seemingly cathartic film for him after the actor’s recent bouts with alcoholism and rehab. He plays Jack, a man fighting his own battles who happens upon coaching a boys’ basketball team, the same team he once played for back in high school. But like any good sports movie, the film’s center is not on the sport itself; it’s on something deeper that transcends the genre. And what could be a more compelling center than a coach battling his own self-destructive tendencies as he tries to save a team from self-destructing on the court.

The film begins without much dialogue, as director Gavin O’Connor shows us what Jack has been dealing with the last few years. The tiny messy apartment, the beers in the shower, being helped up the stairs night after night after drinking himself away at the bar. These recur frequently throughout the film, as O’Connor understands that showing us Jack’s struggles is far more effective communication than a dump truck full of exposition ever would be. O’Connor and Affleck previously worked on an underappreciated action film, The Accountant, which, similar to The Way Back, has a more substantial quality to it that transcends the barriers of its action genre.