Ben Affleck’s Christian Wolff is like if A Beautiful Mind’s John Nash moonlit as Batman. In The Accountant 2, autism remains his superpower, granting him the ability to both crunch numbers with extraordinary speed and accuracy and to assassinate bad guys with peerless lethality.
Nonetheless, director Gavin O’Connor and writer Bill Dubuque’s follow-up to their 2016 hit makes a fundamental and welcome alteration to its template, marrying its methodical John Wick-ish action with the very levity its borderline-preposterous scenario demands. A brutal buddy film pairing Affleck’s killer with his equally murderous brother, it locates the humor in its mayhem and, for it, proves a superior sequel in every respect.
The Accountant 2, which hits theaters April 25, begins with perplexing carnage, as Raymond King (J.K. Simmons), the former deputy director of the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, meets a mysterious woman named Anaïs (Daniella Pineda) at a tavern that’s soon besieged by a hitman seemingly interested in both of them.
Raymond doesn’t make it out alive, but before he perishes, he scrawls a message on his forearm intended for his disciple Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson): “Find the Accountant.” He’s referring to Christian, whom he and Marybeth tracked in the original film, and she does as she’s told, contacting him through the Harbor Neuroscience treatment center where Christian was raised following the death of his father, who taught him to harness his unique condition through rigorous military training.
Harbor Neuroscience is home to Justine (Allison Robertson), a mute adult resident who’s the Alfred to Christian’s Dark Knight, offering him limitless support while speaking via a British computer voice. In The Accountant 2, Justine’s operation has expanded to include a collection of autistic-genius tweens who are more adept at hacking and intel gathering than the Department of Homeland Security.
This is one of the many ways O’Connor and Dubuque lean into cartoonishness, as is an early scene that finds Christian attending a “Romance Rodeo” speed dating event whose system he’s gamed in order to elicit maximum female attention. Despite his unparalleled gift for numbers and formulas, however, his social skills are lacking, and his conversational clumsiness underlines, from the start, that the material plans to embrace Christian’s underlying goofiness.
Affleck embodies Christian as more of a human throughout The Accountant 2, his stern stoicism broken up by the occasional subtle smile, and his “weird” demeanor and behavior complemented by a self-awareness about his awkwardness and, additionally, an active desire for companionship. That manifests itself at a honky-tonk where he seizes the opportunity to line dance with a waitress, although it’s primarily expressed via his partnership with his brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal), who saved his hide in the prior movie and who hasn’t seen his sibling since.
No matter his frustration with that situation, Braxton comes calling when Christian requests his help getting to the bottom of Raymond’s death—a crime he’s been roped into investigating by Marybeth, who believes it had something to do with Raymond’s interest in an El Salvador family whose fate might be tied to a string of international executions.
Like its predecessor, Dubuque’s story is overly convoluted, coming to involve an evil fish monger, a deadly sniper, a low-rent pimp, and a woman who, in the aftermath of a car crash, exhibits “Acquired Savant Syndrome.” The Accountant 2 imagines that the human mind contains boundless comic book-esque talents just waiting to be unlocked. Regardless, its main interest is alternating between brotherly bickering and ferocious gunplay.
Christian and Braxton are polar opposites in terms of personality and yet bonded by blood and a fondness (and flair) for spilling it, and Affleck and Bernthal’s lovingly combative rapport inspires some of the proceedings’ funniest moments, as when Braxton—fed up with his older bro’s logical and fussy impulses—borrows a bottle of sunscreen so he can toss it as far away as possible.
Whether he’s poking fun at Marybeth’s snoring or instigating a fight just so Braxton can do what he loves most—namely, punching people in the face—Affleck’s Christian reveals a newfound jokiness in The Accountant 2. He also does virtually no accounting, with the plot focusing on his and Braxton’s attempts to put together the “puzzle” left by Raymond. All roads lead to Anaïs, whose relationship to this tale’s victims and victimizers turns out to be surprisingly intimate, and who demonstrates—especially in a late one-on-one showdown—that she’s as formidable as the assassins trying to make sense of this madness.
More than one of The Accountant 2’s revelations stretches plausibility to the breaking point, but O’Connor is after rambunctious big-time thrills rather than dogged realism. To that end, he’s largely successful, staging a handful of brawny sequences that let Christian show his stuff in hand-to-hand combat, shootouts, and vehicular chases.
The fact that the hero now owns a motorcycle he’s comfortable driving at 200mph accentuates his resemblance to the DC Comics character Affleck once played. Such parallels, however, are mitigated by the film’s emphasis on tactical skirmishes, culminating with a siege on a Mexican compound in which Christian and Braxton take on a veritable army of anonymous gunmen in an effort to save innocents—one of whom, as Braxton heavy-handedly notes, is a lonely and abandoned kid who reminds Christian of his younger self.
The Accountant 2 eventually assembles its various pieces into something resembling a coherent whole, along the way revealing that Braxton (who’s about to adopt a corgi puppy) is really a cat person and Christian is capable of feeling empathy and articulating his appreciation for those risking their lives for him and his mission.
Some of the script’s late beats are too formulaic and one of its threads is wrapped up with impossible ease, but such shortcomings are minor compared to the laughs generated by Affleck’s droll discomforted routine and Bernthal’s brash belligerence, which makes Braxton come across as a more lighthearted and well-adjusted version of the actor’s Marvel psychopath The Punisher. Together, they’re a mismatched pair whose calculated-crazy dynamic is emblematic of the film as a whole—and robust enough to make one hope it isn’t another nine years before they reunite for a new homicidal adventure.
The post ‘The Accountant 2’: Ben Affleck’s Autistic Assassin Is More Fun Than Ever appeared first on The Daily Beast.
