Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal bro out and the Accountant sequel is better for it.
The Accountant 2 is a weird kind of sequel. 2016’s The Accountant laid a little narrative pipe for the further adventures of Christian Wolff: Rain Man Assassin, but never offered much reason for their existence. As a result, The Accountant 2 feels like a mid-season episode of an action series far enough into its run to have firmed up its mythology. Like coming into an episode of Magnum P.I. or The Equaliser – either vintage – partway through, you can get the gist soon enough. There are plenty of handholds.
Director Gavin O’Connor (dudes rock tearjerker Warrior) and screenwriter Bill DuBuque (Ozark) even give us a little plot-starter sequence that’d serve well for a pre-credits cold open. Retired cop Raymond King (J.K. Simmons, returning – ever so briefly – from the first film) goes down in a hail of bullets when meeting a mysterious woman as part of one of those niggling old cases ex-cops tend to have hanging around. He’s dead, but the best exposition man in the business gets out a dying declaration to his protégé, Treasury Agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) having scrawled Find The Accountant on his forearm. Honestly, he may as well have gasped out “Hire the A-Team.”
And so our hero, accountant, assassin and occasional vigilante Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck wearing a Ben Affleck mask) enters the scene, determined to bring his old friend’s killers to quite terminal justice. Christian was raised to be a kind of home range Delta Force operator, but his real power is his autism. He has a beautiful mind for forensic accounting and covert murder, and he will solve this case through the black belt combo of meticulousness and social awkwardness.
Even more than its predecessor, The Accountant 2 treats ASD as a superpower, and in ways that, when I try to describe them, make me worry I’m inventing new slurs. But then, Affleck’s entire face is a slur in this one, so I think we’ve got some leeway. In terms of positive representation, I defer to a couple of on-the-spectrum critics I know, who opined that in terms of on screen depictions, it’s a lot better than Dustin Hoffman’s haircut in Rain Man.
But The Accountant 2 implies, in oblique but obvious ways, that there’s a whole secret world – an entire spectrum, if you will – of people with autism operating in the shadows, doing hyperfocus-powered crimes, like John Wick‘s High Table if they only served really bland meals. Wolff, it turns out, runs a kind of Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters on the Spectrum with his handler, the non-verbal Justine (Allison Robertson). He uses a squad of them as hackers and data-crunchers; at one point they have to do some Really Important Hacking, and I expected a powering-up montage of all of them stimming in different ways.
And it turns out that ostensible-villain-possible-future-ally Anaïs (Daniella Pineda), the aforementioned mysterious woman, is another mentally gifted super-criminal. Her power is Acquired Savant Syndrome, bestowed on her by some horrific head trauma. Normally that nets you a photographic memory or some artistic talent, but Anaïs’ power is murder. Which raises many questions but indicates that brain damage in The Accountant is like radiation or industrial waste in the Marvel Universe – you’ve got a fair chance of coming out the other side with something cool.
Look, there’s a scene where Affleck uses the power of mathematics to master line dancing in thirty seconds flat and get a girl’s phone number. As far as power fantasies go that’s pretty great, but it’s hardly subtle.
Anaïs is connected to a cold case human trafficking operation in a completely absurd act of plot-wrangling that is well worth discovering on its own, but Christian now has a personal stake, deciding by studying a photo of a missing kid that the kidnaped child is like him and must be rescued at all costs. Because in The Accountant, Rain Men can sense other Rain Men like Immortals in Highlander.
Into this is thrust Christian’s sort-of-estranged brother Brax (God’s Own Character Actor Jon Bernthal) because Christian knows he needs some help on this one. The first film hinted at the brothers reconciling; here we learn quickly that it’s been eight years – Christian just never called. Which is a bit too neat but also such a perfect depiction of so many neurodivergent social relationships that it’s not funny. Testing if people identify strongly with this scene could be a useful diagnostic tool.
Brax is the comic relief and the straight man, the barometer of normal against which Affleck’s studied weirdness can be measured. In a nice but of subversion, we quickly learn that Brax, a mercenary and assassin, has his own issues with confidence and confrontation, suggesting that even baseline normal isn’t “normal” here. Even our straight guy has his baggage.
From there, we get a fun buddy comedy, with Affleck and Bernthal playing off each other wonderfully. It kind of vibes like a riff on Midnight Run, with Bernthal in the De Niro role, and it’s really fun to get a dose of Bernthal’s comic chops. There’s an arc here that involves Christian learning to act “better” towards his loved ones, but it’s pretty light. For plot, every so often we connect up with the storyline about Mexican cartels, human trafficking, kidnapping, and child slavery. The contrast between the two is jarring. The strangest part is how the film tries to play those darker elements lightly – they’re just the plot motor. Instead of softening the horror it has the opposite effect by treating such things so lightly.
It’s an odd discordant note, but it fits with rumours that The Accountant 2 is comprised at least in part of a spec script reworked to be part of the franchise. That’s not too unusual – most Die Hard sequels started that way – but here you can really feel the sheer will holding story elements from at least a couple different scripts together.
But here’s the thing: The Accountant 2 is a lot of fun. Affleck and Bernthal are, well, a dynamic duo, and further films would do well to make full use of their chemistry. Affleck is a coordinated collection of tics here, while Bernthal is doing his Moscow-trained-Method-actor bull-in-a-china-shop thing, but the interplay between the two is a blast. Action this time out is pretty light, with a tacticool sequence in the third act trying to make up for the long build-up, but while it’s satisfying it does feel obligatory. In fact, I might argue that The Accountant 2 isn’t an action movie. It’s a buddy comedy with an identity crisis, and all the better for it.
The Accountant 2 is in Australian cinemas from Thursday, April 24.
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