There are few reasons to revisit The Accountant, the bog-standard 2016 thriller whose only distinguishing feature was the fact that Ben Affleck’s protagonist was explicitly characterised as autistic. But if you were to revisit it, surely it’d be to retool the character to better reflect the neurodivergent experience? In the first film, we’re told that when Christian Wolff (Affleck) was diagnosed, as a child, his father’s immediate response was to train both him and his brother (Jon Bernthal’s Braxton) in the Indonesian martial art of pencak silat, leading the latter to become a hitman and the former an accountant for criminals and terrorists.
It was, realistically, about as good as the autistic community could hope for from mainstream film. Christian adhered to the classic autistic savant trope; his mathematical skills boosted to the point he’s essentially a superhero while, of course, being portrayed by a neurotypical actor. Yet Bill Dubuque’s script was at least sensitive to, and occasionally realistic in, its depiction of how autism shapes Christian’s daily life and relationships, depicting him not as deliberately aloof, but as someone desperately trying to connect to a world that communicates by different means. And Affleck, to his credit, never treated the role as caricature, but as a goddamn action hero.
