Grade: B-

Though it’s nothing more than a brainless action thriller that grows increasingly preposterous as it proceeds to a ludicrous conclusion, “The Accountant” raises one troubling concern about contemporary storytelling—the treatment of autism, or of its cousin Asperger syndrome. The documentaries on the subject—even uplifting ones like “Life, Animated”—are serious, mostly sober affairs, and fiction films that employed it as a plot device generally treated it with extreme sensitivity (think, for instance, of “Adam,” “Rain Man,” “I Am Sam” or “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?”). That emphasis was clear even in a thriller like “Mercury Rising.”

Now, however, such a condition is increasingly being used, rather crudely, as a convenient plot device. “The Darkness” was a dreadful horror movie, but one of its most contemptible aspects was the suggestion that autistic children were somehow closer to the forces of darkness than anyone else, and could unleash malignant spirits into the world. Now Bill Dubuque’s script implies that such a child is especially suited for training as a cold-blooded killer—a skill that can be combined with his super-human aptitude in some intellectual activity (like mathematics). Such depictions are becoming sadly common in contemporary pictures, a screenwriting crutch that would be better avoided.

If one can set that aside, however, “The Accountant” can serve, especially for its first hour, as a guilty pleasure.

After an enigmatic prologue about a mysterious killing spree in a run-down area of NYC, the film introduces Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), a small-town CPA in an Illinois strip mall advising a farming couple (Ron Prather and Susan Williams) about how to avoid bankruptcy. He’s a rigid, laconic fellow who has trouble interacting with people, and flashbacks explain his personality. As a boy (Seth Lee), he was diagnosed with a disorder that gave him special aptitude in completing puzzles (for example), but made him excitable and unable to socialize. Rather than putting him in the care of specialists, his father (Robert C. Treveiler), a hard-nosed military man, trained him and his younger brother (Jake Presley) in martial arts, believing that tough love would enable him to live an independent life.

Affleck, it should be noted, is just about perfect for the role. He’s always been an inexpressive actor with a stiff demeanor, who might remind you of the cruel comment that Pauline Kael once made about Laurence Harvey: that he finally found a role he was capable of playing convincingly in “The Manchurian Candidate”—that of a “brainwashed zombie.” Here Affleck adds a few tics and obligatory daily rituals to fill out the portrait of an intensely self-contained man struggling to live a “normal,” if solitary, life.

But it turns out that Wolff is much more than a simple small-town CPA. The film switches to the Treasury Department in Washington, where Raymond King (J.K. Simmons), an aging agent on the verge of retirement (naturally), blackmails young analyst Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to identify the strange young man who’s glimpsed in the background of photos with some of the world’s most nefarious figures, acting as a “forensic accountant” to determine when they’re being scammed. I’s obviously Wolff, though it takes a good deal of investigation for Medina to reach that conclusion.

Meanwhile Wolff is hired by Lamar Black (John Lithgow), founder of Living Robotics, and his sister (Jean Smart) to locate the source of the siphoning off or company funds that’s been discovered by one of their young accountants, Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick). He does so, but soon he and Dana are being stalked by a ruthless hit-man (Jon Bernthal) and his cutthroat gang. Meanwhile King and Medina are on Wolff’s trail.

“The Accountant” begins with a puzzle motif, and that’s how the movie is structured, with the pursuit of Wolff and Cummings by the hit-men juxtaposed with Wolff’s tracking of them, and the identity of the person who hired the hit-men part of the mix. All of that is accompanied by flashbacks to Wolff’s past and the dogged work of the Treasury agents, which itself is marked by a major series of revelations, including one focused on Francis Silverberg (Jeffrey Tambor), a master mob accountant turned government informant. Everything eventually adds up, in a purely narrative sense, but hardly in a way that anyone could call credible or even remotely plausible. And a final confrontation not only comes across as a compendium of every action-movie cliché one can imagine, but closes with a twist that (like the identity of the chief villain) is not only discernible far in advance, but so utterly coincidental that even one of the characters has to remark on how unlikely it is.

The essential absurdity of the film doesn’t stop it from being entertaining at a rudimentary level, particularly in the first of its two hours, but it does make one wince at the thought that the script is constructed so as to allow for a sequel—or even a series of them. Nonetheless the picture is enlivened by O’Connor’s energetic direction, and by the performances—not just Affleck’s but Kendrick’s (though she has little to do but be pixie-ish), as well as those of the always reliable Simmons, Tambor and Lithgow. Addai-Robinson and Bernthal make strong impressions as well, even if they’re playing cardboard figures. Technically the movie is a solid job, well designed (by Keith Cunningham—the corporate boardroom, with glass surfaces suitable for mathematical computations, is especially attractive), and with editing (by Richard Pearson) that keeps the plot strands reasonably clear. Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography is generally very good, though the action sequences aren’t always ideally crisp, while Mark Isham’s score is okay but forgettable.

Apart from its treatment of autism as a plot ploy in the service of pulpy fiction, there’s not much to think about after watching “The Accountant.” But if the movie doesn’t entirely add up, it can provide some dumb fun along the way.

Grade: B-

“Stop thinking so much,” his wife Ruth (Shanice Banton) remarks to Jesse Owens (Stephan James) at one point in Stephen Hopkins’ biographical film about the legendary black track star who single-handedly (or single-footedly) dashed Adolf Hitler’s perverse belief in Aryan superiority at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. “It’s not what you’re good at,” she adds to predictable audience laughs.

A similar opinion might be expressed—though in a less humorous way—about “Race.” The sledgehammer obviousness of the title’s twofold meaning only reinforces the picture’s lack of thoughtfulness and depth in favor of easy cinematic conventionality. The result is an uplifting sports story so old-fashioned that it seems more a product of World War II Hollywood than of the twenty-first century. Earnest and semi-hagiographical (like the recent “42” about Jackie Robinson’s breaking of Major League baseball’s racial barrier), it’s hard to dislike but at the same time easy to criticize for treating its subject in such glossy, sanitized terms.

The picture opens in 1933 as Owens, a genial Clevelander, is about to depart for Ohio State, leaving behind a baby daughter and his girlfriend Ruth, to whom he pledges to return. His natural speed catches the notice of campus track coach Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis), a once-ranked runner himself whose team has fallen on hard times. What follows is essentially a tale of male bonding between the two, with Snyder becoming the mentor on whom Owens comes to depend all the way through his amazing four-gold-medal victory at the Olympics; Snyder even gets him a work-free job so he can make practice. The friendship is treated in semi-sitcom fashion, with lots of double takes and nods from Sudeikis, although he moderates his more overt comic inclinations for the most part.

As played by the likable James, who’s inhibited somewhat by the shallow script but is ingratiating nonetheless, young Owens endures racial taunts from members of the OSU football team but, under Snyder’s insistent tutelage, breaks no fewer than three world records at a 1935 Big Ten meet in Michigan. The script pauses to recount a career setback from a loss to another African-American sprinter, a fellow appropriately named Peacock (Shamier Anderson), and a rift in his relationship with Ruth caused by his dalliance with a rich girl (Chantel Riley) during a California trip, but his persistence finally pays off. By the end of the year he’s back to his winning ways and he and Ruth are married.

The Olympics are obviously the next step, but there are obstacles in Nazi policies toward minorities, Jews in particular, that led to calls for a boycott of the games. The picture emphasizes the last stage of the debate on the issue, where pro-boycott forces headed by principled Judge Jeremiah Mahoney (William Hurt, barely trying to act) are ultimately defeated by the group led by Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons, playing insufferably arrogant with relish). (The film does not, however, make clear that this final hurdle was overcome not at the American Olympic Committee, but the Amateur Athletic Union.) Even that does not settle matters, however, since Owens is pressured to refuse to participate by the NAACP, among others. Naturally, Snyder proves the deciding factor in his decision, though Peacock makes a contribution as well.

The picture culminates, of course, at the Olympics, where the film takes pains to depict not only Owens’ extraordinary accomplishments but also the racial bias he encounters from the Nazi regime—Hitler, who snubs him, and especially propaganda minister Josef Goebbels (grimly hateful Barnaby Metschurat), who has entrapped the greedy Brundage in a shady business deal he threatens to reveal to the world unless the American falls in line with his wishes. The loathsome Goebbels is, curiously, contrasted with director Leni Reifenstahl (Carice van Houten), who’s recording the games for her masterful propaganda film “Olympiad” and is characterized as a driven, open-minded artist often at odds with the cruelly bigoted minister. She’s only one of the obligatory “good Germans” on display here. Another is Carl “Luz” Long (David Kross), who not only advises Owens on the field in a famous display of sportsmanship but befriends him off it, expressing his disgust with the Nazi regime during a late night visit with the American. The picture closes, however, with a reminder that discrimination was prevalent in the United States during the thirties too, even against a man like Owens, who returned a national hero.

“Race” has the feel of a workmanlike cable docudrama—exactly what one might expect from a journeyman director like Hopkins, whose previous efforts include “Nightmare on Elm Street 5,” “Predator 2” and “Lost in Space” (though, to be fair, he also helmed the British TV mini-series “Traffic” and the cable film “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers”). Of course it’s on a larger scale than a television production would be, with Peter Levy, the director’s regular cameraman, taking advantage of some impressive Canadian and German locations (like the Olympiastadion) and the visual effects teams giving the game sequences a sense of grandeur, with huge computer-generated crowds shouting in the stands. Overall the film is visually solid, with good contributions by production designer David Brisbin, art director Jean-Pierre Paquet and costume designer Mario Davignon. But John Smith’s editing sometimes comes across as a bit too leisurely, and Rachel Portman’s score too often sounds uncharacteristically bombastic.

This is a movie, frankly, that’s saved by its subject, an important tale of a twentieth-century sports triumph that also reveals the dark socio-political realities of the time. Like a bland history lesson, it could be more imaginatively told, but while “Race” may not win or place, it can be described as at least worthy of the bronze.