Theme: Savantism

The Accountant 2 (2025) — Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal

This movie gets started with some annoying music overlaying meaningless messy violence. An irritating warm-up. But after 10 minutes it becomes more engaging, as an agency boss dies with Find The Accountant written on his arm — then we meet an aged Ben Affleck.

This movie benefits from another semi-strong key cast member in Jon Bernthal (The Punisher) playing The Accountant’s brother.

Although the Autism/Savantism trait impersonation is often accurate, it’s also often taken a bit too far / out of context in a kind of insulting way.

One key example of something they should have definitely fixed, is showing The Accountant’s walking as wobbly heavy floppy arms thing with a small reserved swagger — this is how an autistic person might walk if they are physically poorly coordinated, but when an aspie savant masters empty handed martial arts they move with a very stable head and shoulders, no swagger, like Bruce Lee did in his latest movies, or like a cat might move through hostile territory — so they got the dropped hands part right but the lack of contraction and centredness of the arms and torso is badly wrong here.

In the end, I rate this movie Bang Average. Reason being, it’s got a mix of strengths and weaknesses. Some of the concept and some of the action is great, but there’s way too much annoying drama, and most of the action is too noisy, messy and irritating — hardly good viewing.

The original was a bit better, albeit showing many of the same flaws, because it had more coolness as we got to know the main character — that movie was less full of irritating longwinded noisy messy scenes which I won’t call chaos only because chaos originally referred to something divine.

Edge Of Tomorrow (2014) – Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt

The first 10 minutes are cleverly designed to build a backstory to this movie, and while it starts off a bit messy, Tom Cruise‘s presence sharpens it up nicely. By 10 minutes in it’s clear Tom Cruise is playing Major William Cage, some top marketing guy for the military who doesn’t like to get his hands dirty, and upon attempting to blackmail a general, finds himself railroaded to the frontline with his rank stripped and nobody believing his story.

By 20 minutes in, the Major is getting his first taste of battle on the front line and it’s a bit of a nightmare, but it’s well executed, and it soon becomes something quite intriguing, when 5 minutes later he dies and his day restarts and everything becomes Déjà Vu. Then 5 minutes later still – now half an hour in – the day restarts again, so it’s now the third instance of the same day. This time he’s less confused, and tries very hard to prove himself and alert everyone what’s going on, but fails only ends up with a taped up mouth. He also tries fighting the aliens proactively using his limited foresight, but dies pretty quickly. Then we see him die quickly again. Then on the fifth attempt he tries talking to the lead female – the Angel of Verdun, Sergeant Rita Vrataski, played by Emily Blunt – and it’s already clear that he’s been here many times before, the movie’s just skipped several iterations. One the next full reset, we see him try a different tact. He subtly proves his strange abilities to predict the future, and assures everyone he’s not trying to avoid the war – he’s now acting enthusiastic and friendly but not controversial at all – this is of course a rouse to gain everyone’s trust so they all lower their guard and he’s free to do what he needs to do – this time it’s meeting up with the woman who told him to come find her when he wakes up. It seems she has the same ability as he does, and knows all about it. There’s a few nice touches of humour here too.

By 50 minutes in, William Cage (Tom Cruise) and Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) have met Rita’s friend, a top scientist who understands how this alien enemy operates, and what’s causing the day to keep resetting, and everything becomes clear, or at least as clear as it ever will be. Rita starts training Tom in combat skills, which he’s gravely lacking, and she tells him he needs to make sure he dies every day, else he’s out of the game.

It gets a bit tense, gritty and uncomfortable towards the end of the first hour, and it’s safe to say, most of the fun is already gone now. But there’s still nearly an hour left to go. For this reason, although this movie showed great potential to be arguably the best action hero movie ever made, in the end I’m going to settle for a rating of Very Good, which is no mean feat of course.

After a solid 20 minutes of gritty drama and uncomfortable action, the mood picks up with half an hour to go as the Major & Sergeant come up with a new plan and head to HQ to get what they need. Unfortunately though, this refreshing uplift only lasts a few minutes before it gets gritty again and doesn’t let up till the very end. Nevertheless, we can’t discount the great entertainment value of the first hour, making this a Very Good action hero movie on a par with Denzel’s equally great movie The Equalizer from the same year.

Savantism

Mercury Rising (1998) – Bruce Willis

In this movie Bruce Willis plays an FBI agent called Art Jeffries who stumbles across a boy who is being hunted by NSA agents and hitmen who have already killed his parents. The boy is autistic and is wanted because he cracked a code. Bruce tries to protect him. That’s the top and bottom of this movie – it’s a fairly simple but effective plot, with screenplay fairly well executed. The traits of autism depicted in this movie are a mix of authentic and misplaced stereotypes. Overall I rate this an OK movie because it stays captivating quite well on a basic level, mainly thanks to Bruce’s good acting and an effective script albeit playing to a very simple plot. It’s generally a mix of mild action with mild drama. It’s also a fairly memorable movie due to its unique and simple but intriguing and well-executed script.

Strong cast members include Kim Dickens who plays Stacey, the lead female, who helps mind the kid; and Chi McBride who plays Tommy, Art’s colleague at the FBI, who helps him out a lot. Alec Baldwin and Lindsey Ginter play the main baddies – the main brains and the main braun respectively. Still, as respectable as is all their performances, Bruce Willis is the sole star of the show by a massive margin.

The autistic boy, called Simon Lynch, was played by Miko Hughes, and his performance didn’t impress me at all. Fortunately, Bruce’s charisma is ever-present in this movie, and makes a natural distraction from Miko’s poor acting here.

Assassins Savantism

The Accountant (2016) – Ben Affleck

The Accountant is a cool movie to watch for the first time, especially for anyone interested in how Asperger Syndrome (and Savant Syndrome) can affect the performance of a martial artist. Many movies have portrayed a slick, meticulously accurate assassin but few go so far as to portray such a well rounded account of autism by the lead character – this movie is like a cross between Hitman and Rain Man.

In terms of martial arts moves, there’s nothing flashy here. There’s a lot of quick-kill gun shooting and a bit of empty-handed combat of a similar nature. There’s no classical exotic moves but there is a good representation of the spirit of a ninja, you could say.

Casting wasn’t bad – there are multiple strong performances in this movie, including by Jon Bernthal (Marvel’s ‘The Punisher’) and above all the lead role by Ben Affleck.

There are times where production has shined by taking well-researched notions and strong creative ideas then doing them justice on screen, especially where traits of Higher Functioning Autism could manifest themselves in the life of a careful assassin.

The genre is a bit James Bond without the humour – it’s callous from start to finish but only faintly gritty and containing enough James Bond style features to make the movie very watchable by fans of that genre. It has a bit of a simplistic drawn-out ending which makes rewatching it less fun than it otherwise would be – perhaps the writers became complacent after a decent beginning and middle, or the producers ran out of budget to wrap things up in style, or they preferred to linger in the grittier drama genre that the movie exposed us to throughout, even though the bulk of the movie appeals to the opposite audience. There are probably certain people who love both genres, but for a fan of high budget action who steers clear of gritty drama, I would rate this movie an 8 for first-time viewing and slightly lower for rewatchings. Still, it had so much potential and such great good parts (demonstrated perfectly by the trailer) that it could have easily been rated higher with a bit more work, although that would probably have been to the dissatisfaction of gritty drama lovers – perhaps you can’t please everyone and trying to do so may have been the reason why this movie never achieved the heights it was knocking on the door for. Still, a good watch.