Movie review: The Accountant

The Accountant movie review by Marlo Yonocruz

[Warning: spoiler alert]


Synopsis: Christian Wolff is a math savante 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, starting to close in, Christian takes on a legitimate client: a state-of-the-art robotics company where an accounting clerk 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. -IMDb

Development & story:

I’ll admit, I never expected to walk out of the theater so satisfied and wanting to see more. I will say that the buildup towards the action did take a while. In retrospect, however, I can see that this was necessary to balance out the accountant side of Wolff with the trained killer side. I’m glad the action didn’t overshadow the development of his character. While it took longer than expected, it was definitely worth the wait. The backlog of reveals and plot twists at the end completely destroyed any expectations I had going in.

The plot is so multi-layered, it’s almost hard to keep up, but not enough to lose any enjoyment. However, that’s probably one of the reason I’d like to watch it again. There’s so many great scenes and moments. It’s similar to rewatching a movie like The Matrix where each revisit reveals more depth than the first time around. A great movie for intellectuals who enjoy the bigger ideas like myself.

Stone cold killer as accountant? Cool. He’s a high functioning autisic, using a weakness as a strength? Awesome. He seems very quirky and awkward but wants to helps people? Love it. Strong themes of family, compassion, and overcoming adversity? My feels.

Characters & acting:

Continue reading “Movie review: The Accountant”

“Nightmare” & Fear

Nightmare – Daily Writing Prompt

n. An unpleasant or frightening dream or experience; something difficult to deal with

-Nightmares are strange things, yet very insightful. They show us what we fear the most, either overtly or subconsciously. Most people would prefer not to have them as they typically put us in frightening situation we cannot control.

-Nobody likes to be afraid, although some andrenaline seekers might seek out scary things to chase the rush.

Fear: n. an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat

-there’s a quote from that Will Smith movie After Earth that goes:

“The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity. Do not misunderstand me danger is very real but fear is a choice.”

-I absolutely love that. We constantly hold ourselves back everyday because of 3 biggest fears in particular:

  1. Fear of failure
  2. Fear of rejection
  3. Fear of judgement

I think if we didn’t care about failure, we would try more things, learn faster, and achieve more.

Its funny how kids are so resilient to the word “no,” and will keep doing something. But by the time we become adults, we’ve become conditioned to avoid rejection and thus never take risks and achieve more than we think we’re capable of.

If we didn’t care about what others thought, I think we’d be much happier. Fear of being judge makes people so eager to please people they don’t like, and for what? Nothing.

So what’s the cure to fear?

Action.

Action cures fear because once we start doing the thing we fear, the fear lessons. There may or may not have been danger, but the illusion of fear slips away the more action we take.

So go out and face your fear with action.