Partway through director Gavin O’Connor’s introspective thriller The Accountant, Ben Affleck stands in front of a re-rendering of Michelangelo’s famed painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Instead of depicting the hands of God and Adam reaching out to one another, the image instead displays a robotic hand reaching toward that of a human being. Affleck, as mathematics savant and assassin Christian Wolff, occupies the space in front of the robot, while the space in front of the human remains empty. The visual metaphor is at once striking and telling of Wolff’s character: He is reaching out, but no one is reciprocating the gesture.

In the film’s handful of small, revealing moments, The Accountant hints at something great. Christian Wolff bucks the trend of gritty action heroes post-Bourne Identity. Instead of brutal, he is definitively calculating. On his days off from cooking the books for terrorists and cartel bosses, he has a tightrope-like daily routine to which he adheres with a quiet, angry drive.

Affleck, as a self-described “high functioning autistic,” inhabits this role in the same tradition as Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne. It is not so much the actor’s performance, but the character’s isolation, rhythm and mystery that makes him compelling. Unfortunately, O’Connor and screenwriter Bill Dubuque spend far too much time actually solving the mystery.

The opening moments at least suggest something new and relatively unexplored. The story follows Wolff (not actually our hero’s real name, it turns out) as he’s hired to investigate the financial shortcomings of a well-respected robotics company (run by John Lithgow) with the help of charming but naive assistant Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick). When the job is done, Wolff and Cummings find themselves hunted by a group of assassins (headed by The Walking Dead’s Jon Bernthal) and a fiercely determined Treasury agent (J.K. Simmons). Cue the badassery. Meanwhile, in between the Beautiful Mind-esque math sequences and fist fights, glimpses of Wolff’s past and origins occasionally reveal themselves.

There is plenty to like here, at least in the opening hour or so. Sleekness is this film’s savior from its inherent silliness. As much as it begs to be believed, Wolff’s status as a ninja-like crack shot crossed with Rain Man is too ridiculous a concept to hold much water. Luckily, O’Connor has a compelling sense of how to make it all flow together.

The movie is well-shot, with plenty of silvery, reflective surfaces and muted grays that construct a relatively subtle palette. It is a look that demands respect.

Cracks begin to appear, however, as this plot progresses. The Accountant may be an action film by design, but twists, turns and the sheer number of tertiary characters involved suggest a bloated, character-based television drama. The story intends to withhold information from the audience to prepare for a series of mind-blowing revelations at the film’s end, but these attempts to pull the rug out from the audience falter under the weight of pure confusion.

To truly fall for what O’Connor and Dubuque have planned requires an absurd suspension of disbelief, at which even the most heedless movie-goer would balk.

For all of its visual polish and occasionally subtle moments of character, The Accountant fails to construct a coherent story, which is a shame, if only because the Action Hero has been in dire need of a new archetype. This film may be about a genius, but it stumbles when it attempts to accomplish too many things at once.

Watch the trailer for The Accountant below: