RATING
Director(s): Bill Dubuque
Country: United States
Author: Ryan Coogler
Actor(s): Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson
Written by Tom Augustine
A film like The Accountant 2 is not designed to be topical, and yet by fate or coincidence it suddenly is. The film, a sequel to the solid 2016 actioner The Accountant, starring Ben Affleck as an autistic accounting genius-slash-hitman, finds itself arriving into a far less friendly world than even the one that found the original, particularly toward neurodivergence in America. US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a title that should probably be be in scare quotes, recently claimed that autism was an ‘epidemic’ that ‘destroys families’, vowing to pinpoint the ‘cause’ of autism within the year, a comment that many assume is referencing the erroneous notion that vaccines are the reason for the condition. This is, of course, utter eugenicist bullshit — especially considering the ghoulish, leathery RFK is the last person who should be commenting on the health or wellbeing of anyone else — and if you, as I do, have a person or persons close to you with autism it’s likely to make your blood boil. The Accountant, along with its sequel, does an admirably fine job at detailing the ways in which engaging the world as an autistic person can be a wonderful thing, in amongst the bloodletting and gunplay. It is not an affliction, it is simply another way of seeing — and a beautiful one, with many things to teach us if we set aside arrogant, narrow minded preconceptions. The Accountant 2 is not really designed to be a political instrument, and yet it surprisingly provides a useful corrective in an emerging fascist American landscape, under the banner of that most fervently conservative genre of American film, the action movie.
The Accountant 2 also has another evidently unintentional dash of currency. It is not the only action film to cast as its antagonists the Mexican drug and trafficking cartels — indeed, A Working Man did the same only a month ago — and yet the tenor of The Accountant 2’s approach provides a pang of recognition, centering as it does around a missing persons case involving immigrants from El Salvador. In the context of the Trump administration’s unlawful deportations of citizens and immigrants alike to a notorious prison in that country, The Accountant 2 suddenly has the burden of topicality to contend with, something it is not entirely up to tackling (though it’s a sight better than, say, Rambo: Last Blood or Sicario: Day of the Soldado). Much like its predecessor, The Accountant 2 is a strange tonal mishmash of po-faced action, gooey family dynamics and sudden bursts of absurd comedy — like its predecessor, it generally works, though not always, and least often when it concerns itself with cartel intrigue. It’s most effective as a sturdy Dad-core actioner, the latest in a banner month for that particular vein of cinema (between this, A Working Man and The Amateur), with all the pleasures that implies.
Ben Affleck, in one of his more intriguing performances, returns as Christian Wolff, the titular Accountant, a neurodivergent man who uses his extreme aptitude with numbers and analytical thinking to cook the books for the baddest hombres on the planet — cartels, mafioso, arms dealers and the like. He is also, care of a militant upbringing with his ex-army father, a masterful killer, an expert marksman, and a hand-to-hand combat savant. His brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) is also in the field, a contract killer whose fraternal revelation was something of a twist in the original film. In The Accountant 2, the death of one-time Treasury Department director Raymond King (JK Simmons, underutilised) sets Wolff on the path of a peculiar missing persons case involving a slinky superkiller (Cowboy Bebop’s Daniella Pineda), memory loss, reconstructive plastic surgery, child kidnapping and any number of cartel heavies, pimps and traffickers. The lonesome Wolff, seeking in his own admittedly less-than-successful manner human connection with others, contacts Brax, from whom he has become estranged since the events of the first Accountant, kicking off a path to reconciliation riddled with bullets and blood.
Arriving several years after sleeper hit Ben Affleck actioner The Accountant, this sequel endearingly doubles down on what worked in the original iteration, embracing the goofier, warmer, funnier elements of tone only hinted at on first go-round. It’s successful when leaning into the delightful chemistry of co-stars Affleck and Jon Bernthal; less so playacting as a convoluted mystery or piece of social commentary.
A film like The Accountant 2 is not designed to be topical, and yet by fate or coincidence it suddenly is. The film, a sequel to the solid 2016 actioner The Accountant, starring Ben Affleck as an autistic accounting genius-slash-hitman, finds itself arriving into a far less friendly world than even the one that found the original, particularly toward neurodivergence in America. US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a title that should probably be be in scare quotes, recently claimed that autism was an ‘epidemic’ that ‘destroys families’, vowing to pinpoint the ‘cause’ of autism within the year, a comment that many assume is referencing the erroneous notion that vaccines are the reason for the condition. This is, of course, utter eugenicist bullshit — especially considering the ghoulish, leathery RFK is the last person who should be commenting on the health or wellbeing of anyone else — and if you, as I do, have a person or persons close to you with autism it’s likely to make your blood boil. The Accountant, along with its sequel, does an admirably fine job at detailing the ways in which engaging the world as an autistic person can be a wonderful thing, in amongst the bloodletting and gunplay. It is not an affliction, it is simply another way of seeing — and a beautiful one, with many things to teach us if we set aside arrogant, narrow minded preconceptions. The Accountant 2 is not really designed to be a political instrument, and yet it surprisingly provides a useful corrective in an emerging fascist American landscape, under the banner of that most fervently conservative genre of American film, the action movie.
The Accountant 2 also has another evidently unintentional dash of currency. It is not the only action film to cast as its antagonists the Mexican drug and trafficking cartels — indeed, A Working Man did the same only a month ago — and yet the tenor of The Accountant 2’s approach provides a pang of recognition, centering as it does around a missing persons case involving immigrants from El Salvador. In the context of the Trump administration’s unlawful deportations of citizens and immigrants alike to a notorious prison in that country, The Accountant 2 suddenly has the burden of topicality to contend with, something it is not entirely up to tackling (though it’s a sight better than, say, Rambo: Last Blood or Sicario: Day of the Soldado). Much like its predecessor, The Accountant 2 is a strange tonal mishmash of po-faced action, gooey family dynamics and sudden bursts of absurd comedy — like its predecessor, it generally works, though not always, and least often when it concerns itself with cartel intrigue. It’s most effective as a sturdy Dad-core actioner, the latest in a banner month for that particular vein of cinema (between this, A Working Man and The Amateur), with all the pleasures that implies.
Ben Affleck, in one of his more intriguing performances, returns as Christian Wolff, the titular Accountant, a neurodivergent man who uses his extreme aptitude with numbers and analytical thinking to cook the books for the baddest hombres on the planet — cartels, mafioso, arms dealers and the like. He is also, care of a militant upbringing with his ex-army father, a masterful killer, an expert marksman, and a hand-to-hand combat savant. His brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) is also in the field, a contract killer whose fraternal revelation was something of a twist in the original film. In The Accountant 2, the death of one-time Treasury Department director Raymond King (JK Simmons, underutilised) sets Wolff on the path of a peculiar missing persons case involving a slinky superkiller (Cowboy Bebop’s Daniella Pineda), memory loss, reconstructive plastic surgery, child kidnapping and any number of cartel heavies, pimps and traffickers. The lonesome Wolff, seeking in his own admittedly less-than-successful manner human connection with others, contacts Brax, from whom he has become estranged since the events of the first Accountant, kicking off a path to reconciliation riddled with bullets and blood.
Much of the enjoyment and watchability of the original Accountant stemmed from Affleck’s against-type turn, establishing a quietly subversive action hero for an era that had no need for muscled, quip-laden gun-toters. His Wolff was by turns menacing, hilarious and affecting, having established coping mechanisms in a world largely unfriendly to the way his mind works. With a lot of the Accountant’s mythos already laid down, The Accountant 2 is given permission to range further afield, and returning director Gavin O’Connor allows himself the leeway to produce something shaggier, more oddball, but also more appreciably goofy. Where the previous instalment’s silliness felt self-conscious, as though the idea of an autistic accountant/killing machine was a concept to be taken with utmost seriousness, The Accountant 2 embraces the elements that make this heightened, tone-swinging mishmash compulsively watchable, even when it veers into territory it can’t quite wrangle. O’Connor, the rock-solid journeyman behind rousing masculine dramas Miracle, The Way Back and, especially, the wonderful Warrior, a film tailor-made for wrenching tears out of grown male ducts, here employs the same wounded, vulnerable tendency toward the heartfelt, a mixer that shouldn’t comply with the amorality of the Wolff brothers’ lifestyles and yet somehow does in spades. This is in large part down to the wonderful chemistry between Affleck and Bernthal — and The Accountant 2 interestingly seems largely content with letting Affleck’s Christian take a back-seat for much of the drama, ceding to Bernthal, who brings natural charisma and pathos to the role. Bernthal’s Brax is far-and-away the best thing about The Accountant 2, a stunted man-child contending with his own alienation from the world around him and the woundedness he feels at Christian’s incapability — due to his neurodivergence or otherwise — to reconnect with him. The times when the action fades into the background and the two brothers are allowed to simply hang out with one another are, ironically, some of the best in the film, particularly a delightful sequence at a line-dancing country dive bar.
As for the action, in O’Connor’s hands it is suitably bruising, well-covered, solidly unremarkable. There are some fine set-pieces, particularly a climactic one set at a sun-drenched cartel hideaway, that fuses Call of Duty militarism with John Wick-like gun ballet to strong returns. The mystery plotting is The Accountant 2 at its weakest, by turns needlessly convoluted and full of soapy twists and turns, largely pivoting around Pineda’s elusive assassin. Much the same as The Accountant, the push of the narrative seems to feel it needs to overcomplicate to convince as a movie for grown-ups; instead, the many entangled threads just end up interfering with the emotional journeys of the two brothers front-and-centre — not disastrously, but enough to hold The Accountant 2 back from schlocky action greatness. If The Accountant 2 is a success, boding the birth of a new multi-faceted franchise of the kind Keanu Reeves and Liam Neeson have made their bread-and-butter, we could do (and have done) a lot worse — one gets the sense that O’Connor, Affleck, Bernthal and company have not yet perfected the formula, but they’re getting closer and closer.
The Accountant 2 is in cinemas now.