Movie Date: The Accountant (NC16)
An offbeat action flick that benefits from Affleck and his stellar co-stars.
STARRING: Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, Jeffrey Tambor, John Lithgow
DIRECTOR: Gavin O’Connor
THE SKINNY: Mathematics savant Christian Wolff (Affleck) is a freelance accountant for the world’s most dangerous criminal organisations. But when he takes on a legitimate client — a robotics company where accounting clerk Dana Cummings (Kendrick) has discovered a discrepancy of millions of dollars — he needs his mathematical smarts and superb fighting skills to dig himself out of the mess.
RATING: NC16
MARS by JASON JOHNSON
What a strange film.
The thing I can't figure out is if it's strange in a good way or a bad way.
Basically there seems to be way too much going on with the title character.
He's got Asperger's.
He's an accounting genius.
He cooks the books for wealthy criminals.
He's an expert marksman and unbeatable at hand-to-hand combat.
He's an art collector.
Bad guys are after him and so are the Feds.
He has an alarmingly strange bedtime ritual.
He had a weird relationship with his family, which we learn about via numerous flashbacks.
He can barely communicate with normal people, but he digs smart chicks like Kendrick.
I mean, you could take any one of these story elements and build a whole movie around it.
The flick is convoluted and overstuffed. The movie is simply trying too hard.
That said, I still rather enjoyed it. It has a crisp look and feel that gives it a classy vibe.
The cast is a lot of fun, with great character actors such as Simmons, Tambor and Lithgow, giving the picture more weight than it might otherwise possess.
Then there's Affleck, who is utterly believable in his affectlessness.
Without giving anything away, I must tell you that I was almost totally immune to the furious machinating of The Accountant until the bonkers finale kind of won me.
Decide for yourself.
Verdict: 3/5 stars
VENUS by Lisa Twang
How can a superhero be a genius both at maths and kicking butt?
Most people are usually one or the other.
It's a bit unbelievable at first to see Affleck's character, Christian, balancing accounting books with the same crazy precision as wrestling five men to the ground. But these superhumans do exist.
This is what you would get if you smashed A Beautiful Mind and John Wick together, and added a dose of Affleck.
Bits of it also remind me of the X-Men movies, because Christian has Asperger's syndrome and spends his childhood in a house with other "special" kids.
So yeah, this is a mash-up of several different kinds of movies, but I personally dig it.
It's so not your average superhero flick, which is a huge plus because I am sick of the dour, overly serious ones like Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice.
The Accountant has oddball jokes about the Dogs Playing Poker painting, and scenes where Christian uses melons with marker-drawn faces for rifle target practice.
I enjoyed the gritty action, dark humour and how the film cleverly tied up its loose ends.
Affleck and Kendrick are sweet together, and the supporting cast does a great job fleshing out the story.
Watch this if you have ever wondered what Batman would be like as an awkward maths savant.
Verdict: 4/5 stars
THE CONSENSUS: An offbeat action flick that benefits from Affleck and his stellar co-stars.
Movie Review: Operation Mekong (PG
If there's one thing this movie has, it's guns. Lots of them.
Operation Mekong is an action film that barely gives its characters, or its audience, a moment to breathe.
It's based on the events of the 2011 Mekong River massacre that saw 13 Chinese nationals from two merchant ships murdered by a drug ring.
In their search for the leader of the drug ring, intelligence officer Fang Xinwu (Eddie Peng) and Captain Gao Gang (Zhang Hanyu) with his team of narcotics officers run from gun fight to gun fight, that take place in cars, boats, a mall and a forest.
The film constantly throws in confusing plot points and a rotating cast of irrelevant supporting characters. Some scenes feel like something you've already seen in another action film.
But it's an interesting take on the tragedy and thankfully, Peng and Hang manage to ground this ambitious story.
Verdict: 2/5
Movie Poster: Logan
LOGAN
What It Looks Like:
Having grown tired of slicing up bad guys for a living, superhero Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) takes a job as a kindergarten teacher. The children greatly improve their skills in the areas of cigar-smoking, scowling, quipping and bare-knuckle brawling.
What It's Really About:
Professor X (Patrick Stewart) joins Logan in this sequel.
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