The Accountant’s Can: The SilencerCo Osprey 45
Will Dabbs
“The Accountant” was a shockingly good movie. If you haven’t yet seen it, stop what you’re doing, surf on over to Amazon and give it a watch. I don’t care if you’re on a date with your spouse, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, piloting a spacecraft to the International Space Station or disarming a nuclear bomb, do this now. You’ll thank me later.
Here’s the obligatory spoiler alert – we’re about to talk about a simply superb gun nerd film. If you haven’t seen it yet, go back, reread the first paragraph and do what it says. Otherwise, you’ve been forewarned.
Forgive the sexist stereotypes, but on the surface the basic plot seems like pure chick garbage. An autistic kid is abandoned by his mother at a young age and bullied mercilessly at school. His Army officer dad compensates by pushing him ever harder, going so far as to have the kid literally beaten by his martial arts instructor. Throughout his utterly broken childhood, the kid’s little brother is his only companion and sort-of friend. The young man has an unnatural gift for numbers, but is so smitten with emotional baggage that he is unable to establish or maintain anything resembling a normal relationship. Despite his abysmal foundation, this sad little boy grows up to be a successful accountant.
Fade to black, raise the lights…
Sounds like some typical emotionally gooey pablum from the Hallmark Channel, no? Well, take that basic plot and throw in a Barrett M82A1 .50-caliber anti-materiel rifle, some wicked martial arts skills, a twisted tale of betrayal and revenge and an utterly sweet suppressed 1911 pistol and you have “The Accountant” in a nutshell. It was the best gun geek film of the year.
The Details
Ben Affleck plays a forensic accountant named Christian Wolff. Wolff’s high-functioning form of autism makes him a mathematical savant. He does jigsaw puzzles upside down so he can’t see the picture and becomes unhinged if he cannot follow a task through to completion. His Army officer dad uses close combat skills as an outlet to funnel the kid’s dysfunctional energy and give him the tools he needs to control his emotions and defend himself in the face of a cruel cold world.
Wolff’s inability to form emotional attachments makes him the ideal accountant for organized crime and drug cartels. To the accountant, it’s always just business. In a dark and sordid world characterized by betrayal, graft and greed, he’s the guy who can always be trusted. Unlike other “normal” people, Christian Wolff is ever reliable no matter the circumstances. It’s a simply inspired premise.
You associate with some of the world’s worst people long enough and eventually some of that stuff gets on you. Wolff’s only real friend is abducted and killed by the mob, so Wolff takes up a gun and makes things right. Wolff’s only real pastime is precision shooting, but he ultimately needs those skills when he is inadvertently drawn ever deeper into a web of corporate deceit and murder. Before the credits roll, there is some simply epic professional gunplay, lots of top-flight martial arts work and a delightfully unexpected plot twist at the end.
The Accountant’s Arsenal
The Barrett M82A1 figures prominently in several cool scenes, one of which involves firing the big semiauto 50 offhand to take out a pickup truck with a round through the engine block. When Wolff needs a proper long arm for an assault into the villain’s heavily-defended evil lair, he opts for a Daniel Defense DDM4 Mk18. There are lots of other cool weapons, including a mini Uzi, an HK416, a couple of Smith revolvers and some Springfield Armory iron that we see in Wolff’s trailer-borne arms room. Where the guy really shines, however, is at close quarters with his tricked-out handgun.
Wolff’s pistol is a Para-Ordnance high capacity Black Ops 1911 outfitted with a Surefire X300 weaponlight and a SilencerCo Osprey sound suppressor. The Black Ops 1911, now out of production, features a double column, single feed 14-round magazine, a threaded barrel, and optimized everything. What really makes the gun stand out, however, is that weirdly cool rectangular sound suppressor perched on its snout.
The SilencerCo Osprey 45
The girth issue is addressed by packing the gun and suppressor separately so it doesn’t snag on a holster. There are two solutions to the occluded sights problem: You can use a gun that features elevated “suppressor-height” sights that are kind of cumbersome, or you can design a novel suppressor architecture that provides ample volume for effective suppression while leaving the sight plane clear and unobstructed. SilencerCo opted for the latter.
The SilencerCo Osprey is unique to the marketplace. Aluminum and stainless steel construction means modest weight, long life and high performance. The Osprey comes in three different variants.
The Osprey 9 is 6.9 inches long and weighs 9.6 ounces. The full-sized osprey 45 is 7.89 inches long and weighs 10.3 ounces. The intermediate Osprey 45K is 6.4 inches long and weighs 9.2 ounces.
All three Osprey cans incorporate the same offset architecture as well as a Linear Inertial Decoupler for reliable operation on recoil-operated handguns. The Osprey 9 is rated for 9mm and subsonic .300BLK applications. The two larger variants will manage these same rounds, as well as .40S&W and .45ACP.
The Osprey suppressors incorporate a novel indexing mechanism that allows the operator to orient the can properly and then lock it in place to ensure an unobstructed view of standard-height pistol sights. To mount it up, you back out the threaded locking ring at the back of the can using a special tool included with the suppressor. Once the appropriate piston is installed for your application, you thread the can onto your weapon in the conventional fashion. With the suppressor nice and snug, you release the brake lever, rotate the can around until it is oriented properly relative to the gun, and lock the lever in place. I can swap piston mounts between 9mm and .45ACP to use the same can in either caliber in about a minute.
In a world where tactical precision and peripheral vision can literally make the difference between survival and tragedy, the SilencerCo Osprey is unrivalled. As the guys who made “The Accountant”came to realize as well, the Osprey also just looks super cool. I know we grizzled military veterans aren’t supposed to care about such stuff as vapid aesthetics, but there you are. The MSRP is $918.
Ruminations
When I finally got my mitts on an Osprey-equipped top-end 1911 combat pistol, I was smitten. My Kimber TLE/RL II 1911 stood in for Christian Wolff’s Para Ordnance heater, but after spending an afternoon throwing rounds downrange I can certainly see the appeal. The Osprey 45 is the bee’s knees.
Centerfire pistol cans in real life don’t sound much like the movies. The .45ACP round is naturally subsonic, but John Moses Browning’s massive thumbnail-sized bullet leaves a big hole. This makes for a fairly loud package – no matter how rarefied the suppressor design. The effect is a bit like a serious pneumatic nail gun. However, handgun suppressors allow you to communicate in tight spaces while retaining your hearing. My full-sized Osprey 45 reflects the current state of the art.
Despite copious gunplay and ample gratuitous violence, or perhaps because of those things, The Accountant was my feel-good movie of the year. At risk of losing my platinum membership in Certified Testosterone Donors of America (CTDoA is not a real political activist organization), I actually developed an emotional attachment to the Christian Wolff character. I wanted things to turn out well for him. When he emerged victorious with his carcass, his family and his quirky little world intact, I quietly rejoiced. Now that I’ve discovered my sensitive side, perhaps my new favorite channel should be Hallmark rather than History.
Will Dabbs
