BEFORE: Ben Affleck carries over from "Justice League", and so does the actor who played Commissioner Gordon, sharing screen time again with the current Batman, although this film was released a year earlier, so I guess yesterday's film was the real reunion. Once again I have to point out that I planned this chain months ago, long before any Hollywood harassment/abuse scandals surfaced, so it's too late for me to change things around and start boycotting films because of who starred in or produced them, not if I want to finish the year the way I planned, and link to "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" on the day it premieres.
But, if you're keeping track, in addition to any allegations against Affleck, this film was produced by Ratpac, Brett Ratner's production company, though he is not credited as a producer on this one. And just for good measure, news broke yesterday of ANOTHER actor in this film being accused of sexual harassment, so really, I can't win here. Until Hollywood finishes cleaning house and decides who gets to keep making movies and who doesn't, I'm just going to stick with my plan - because all this boycotting and firing is starting to approach something akin to "guilty until proven innocent", and that's not only the way the legal system is supposed to work, it opens the door to possible false accusations causing someone to lose their jobs. Let me be clear, 99% of men in Hollywood are probably perverts, and 99% of these accusations being made are probably true, but I'm also worried about the 1% of accusations that might be false, and innocent people possibly having their careers ruined.
Not to mention all of the people who were working on "House of Cards", "Transparent", and that animated show from Louis CK's company - those people are also victims, losing their jobs right before the holidays because a production company has suddenly decided that a movie or TV show is suddenly not marketable because of one actor getting bad press. Does that seem fair?
THE PLOT: As a math savant uncooks the books for a new client, the Treasury Department closes in on his activities, and the body count starts to rise.
AFTER: It seems like MAYBE someone had good intentions here, trying to create a character in the vein of John Wick or The Equalizer, but who overcame things like autism and childhood trauma to be a (high-)functioning member of society. Someone who might do "bad" things, but for "good" reasons. Like, for example, Marvel's Punisher character, who turned the loss of his family into a one-man war on crime, becoming a ruthless killer, but only of bad people - sinning to rid the world of other sinners.
But I'm just not sure this film goes about things in the right way, and instead could end up giving a lot of terrible ideas to people. Autism and other learning disorders are already a hot-button social and political topic, and this film is just going to add fuel to the fire. Remember back when "Rain Man" came out, and people questioned scenes like taking Dustin Hoffman's character out of the home, bringing him to a casino and teaching him to count cards? Yeah, it's like that, only ten times worse.
Let me go on the record here and state that I don't fully understand autism. (Does anyone?) I know there's been a lot MORE of it than there used to be, or maybe there's just more reporting being done, better record-keeping could make it seem like a disorder is on the rise. I don't know anything about what causes it, how to cure it, or what happens to those kids when they become adults. Do some of them become functioning members of society, while others just don't? I need to research this, because it's not really something that I've heard people discuss openly.
So I'm presented with a character that USED to be autistic, or had some similar kind of disorder like OCD or ADHD, or is some kind of savant, and we see flashbacks to him as a child, while being diagnosed he puts together a jigsaw puzzle at record speed - only he's not looking at the picture, he's doing it while looking at the BLANK sides, which I don't think is possible, even for a savant. And then when he's missing one piece, he starts to freak out. Thankfully my own OCD was never that bad, I had a few jigsaws as a kid that were missing pieces but I learned to live with that. Back in my day, we just called the weird kids "weird", and I say this as one of those kids. (I was the brainy fat kid, so I took my lumps in grade school and learned to deal with it until junior high, when things got better.)
Over the course of the film, through flashbacks we learn that this character (called Christian Wolff, but apparently this is an alias and we never learn his real name in the film...) grew up with a military father, and his mother split since she couldn't deal with her son's disability, and that his little brother ended up being his protector, and all that seems to track. But his father chose to handle his son's autism by training him as an expert in hand-to-hand combat, and apparently in the use of firearms as well. This is some kind of screenwriter's fantasy, I guess, and was necessary to create the character he wanted to profile, but from a medical standpoint, this is probably the worse tactic to take to deal with autism since Jenny McCarthy started telling people to not get their kids vaccinated. It's irresponsible at best - do we really want more people with learning disorders and unpredictable personalities to have working knowledge of firearms?
We also learn that this guy is now an incredible forensic accountant, because his disorder allows him to have the equivalent of superhuman focus - so give him 15 years of a company's books, and he'll figure out who's embezzling money, and how, and he'll stay up all night and obsess over it until he cracks the case. OK, maybe there are skills that he developed or acquired that could help him here, and maybe there are aspects of his disorder that can help him at certain jobs, but this is just a bit beyond believable.
What muddies the waters even further here is that he seems to work for all manner of clients, from getting a farming couple the maximum tax deduction, to cooking the books for the mob - so where's his moral center if he's taking on both legal and illegal clients? How am I supposed to root for him now? Plus, what are the chances against someone possessing this exact set of skills, someone who can both figure out who's blackmailing you AND can beat them in a shooting match? Extremely unlikely.
Seeing things from the point of view of the Treasury agent isn't much better - this aspect of the film plays out like a procedural, and therefore seems like it would answer some questions about who this guy is and why he does what he does, but even as the lesser agent manages to crack the code and find out some things about how he operates, her superior then reveals more information that basically contradicts everything we've seen before. It seems the Treasury Dept. used him as a mole once, sent him undercover to prison to get some important information from an inmate. Yet, NITPICK POINT: they didn't find out his real name or anything else about him, before using him? This makes zero sense. Someone didn't do their detective work on him when they had the chance, and now it's too late?
Plus, how can the Treasury agent know so much about him, without knowing his name? He knows so many details about the guy's family that with a minimal amount of research he should be able to close that gap - is he just lazy? This is a complete dodge, it's meant to be a twist since we at first believe he's trying to catch the guy and knows nothing about him, to change things up in the second half also makes no sense. Twists are twists, but if they don't work then they shouldn't be there in the first place.
There's another big NITPICK POINT that I'm redacting here, another one of those unbelievable, near-impossible coincidences. But I figured out where this was headed about an hour before the twist, and once again, I learned too much from reading the cast list before watching the film, so I really should stop doing that.
Also starring Anna Kendrick (last seen in "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates"), J.K. Simmons (also carrying over from "Justice League"), Jon Bernthal (last seen in "Sicario"), Jeffrey Tambor (last heard in "A Merry Friggin' Christmas"), Cynthia Addai-Robinson, John Lithgow (last seen in "Orange County"), Jean Smart (last seen in "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Andy Umberger (last seen in "Bounce"), Alison Wright, Jason Davis (last seen in "Concussion"), Robert C. Treveiler, Mary Kraft, Seth Lee, Jake Presley, Izzy Fenech, Ron Prather (last seen in "42"), Susan Williams, Gary Basaraba (last seen in "The Smurfs 2").
RATING: 4 out of 10 cantaloupes
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