The Accountant 2 could’ve been a pretty good movie, if it weren’t a sequel to The Accountant. It’s best suited as a hangout picture, sporting playful dialogue, a light comic touch, and a pair of appealing performances. Yet because this emergent franchise made its bones as a hot-blooded crime yarn, it subjugates its mild-mannered strengths in favor byzantine plotting and stale gunplay. It’s guilty of genre evasion.
Yet the Hollywood IP machine cranks on, and there are worse figures to resuscitate than Christian Wolff, the autistic genius and assassin who first appeared on screen nine years ago in the hunky, bespectacled form of Ben Affleck. The decade away hasn’t improved Christian’s social skills: When we first catch up with him, he’s the eye of a speed-dating hurricane, only we learn that single ladies are throwing themselves at him because he hacked the app’s algorithm; once he opens his mouth and starts rambling about appreciating assets, their excitement quickly curdles into dismay.
The timing of that sequence, which intercuts Christian’s flailing flirtations with his tweedy explanation of how he manipulated the site’s system to make himself look more desirable, is awkward—an extended joke that’s all setup, no payoff. Such temporal stumbling becomes something of a pattern in The Accountant 2, which was one again directed by Gavin O’Connor from a script by Bill Dubuque. The screenplay often lurches backward and forward, struggling to accommodate its many subplots and vomiting exposition to link its strands together. Christian, despite his quirks, is reasonably comfortable in his own skin, but the movie he headlines suffers from an identity crisis; it wants to operate as a convoluted action thriller, when it’s far more effective as a character study and comedy.
Not that The Accountant 2 treats autism as a laughing matter. It depicts the developmental disorder less as a disease than a superpower, a blessing of advanced deductive reasoning that allows Christian to uncover vast conspiracies hidden in reams of data. Yes, there is an evidence board—a wall tacked with freighted photographs and highlighted maps and (of course) tax forms—which he rearranges in the dead of night to reveal crucial information that mere humans couldn’t hope to learn on their own.
But he isn’t working alone. You know those tiered conference facilities in movies like Enemy of the State and Jason Bourne, where diligent intelligence-agency staffers scrutinize their monitors and pound away at their keyboards? Christian routinely telelinks with one of those, only it’s operated by a small army of mute children who share his affliction/aptitude, overseen by a faceless woman who speaks in the honeyed diction of Alison Wright. When she instructs one of these preteen geniuses to “enhance” an image illicitly downloaded from a security camera, I confess that I punched the air.
In the flesh, Christian is joined by Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), which is where the problems come in. Even if you saw The Accountant in theaters in 2016, you probably don’t remember Medina, a Treasury Department flunky whose primary function was to listen to information spewed forth by her boss, Raymond King (J.K. Simmons). He’s back too, though not for long; in the movie’s competent, conventional opening sequence, he’s assassinated by a gang of coldly efficient killers, though not before scrawling “Find the accountant” on his arm with a ballpoint pen. Medina, resolved to Get To The Bottom Of This, reaches out to Christian, and those photos start getting pinned onto that wall.
The narrative of The Accountant 2 is stuffed with stuff, none of which is very interesting or original. There is a plot point about immigration and human trafficking that includes a tossed-off mention of El Salvador, lending this piece of dopey escapism an accidental frisson of topicality. There is a ruthless contract killer (Daniella Pineda, from the Jurassic World pictures) whose amnesia provides the film with one of its many excuses to detour into clumsily shoehorned flashbacks. There are a few dastardly villains whose putative evil isn’t remotely colorful enough to justify the time we spend with them. And there is a tedious thematic throughline juxtaposing Medina’s bureaucratic intransigence with Christian’s brute-force methodology; her stubborn insistence on obeying due process doesn’t yield results, whereas his willingness to break a tax cheat’s arm instantly produces valuable intel. (There is not, sadly, Anna Kendrick, who imbued the first Accountant with a sliver of human dimension, and who coincidentally is busy headlining her own dubiously sourced sequel to a years-old property.)
All of this might suggest that The Accountant 2 is a bad movie, and in some ways I suppose it is. But it is also quite enjoyable, and its pleasure derives from the relationship between Christian and Braxton, the remorseless hit man played by Jon Bernthal. The original film concluded with the less-than-shocking revelation that Braxton, who tends to leave a trail of bloody bodies in his wake, was Christian’s long-lost brother. The sequel capitalizes on this by granting these two violent, volatile men the opportunity to spend actual time together, allowing them to develop a fraternal rapport that’s both funny and curiously touching.
In terms of temperament, Christian and Braxton are obvious opposites, and the actors happily play up their (neuro)divergent personalities. Affleck, to his credit, doesn’t overdo the fidgety affectations, instead channeling the character’s syndrome mostly into his voice; Christian speaks in a half-whisper, placing little weight on his vocals while still crisply enunciating all of his syllables. Bernthal, by contrast, is a born screamer who turns simple dialogue into banquets. (When we’re reintroduced to Braxton, he’s snarling into a mirror, bare chest rippling, psyching himself up to terrorize an anonymous foe; turns out, he’s defeated by the pet-shop owner who refuses to let him pick up a labradoodle during the puppy’s exposure period.)
“Is it because of you or because of me?” Braxton asks Christian, wondering—with disarming sincerity—why they haven’t kept in touch. The Accountant 2 doesn’t really answer that question, but it does allow the brothers to make up for lost time. In the movie’s best and warmest sequence—which, as it happens, has nothing to do with advancing its plot—they visit a Texas-themed bar, where Christian discovers a talent for the gestural precision of line dancing, to Braxton’s unvarnished delight. Not long before, Christian diagnoses his sibling’s itinerant behavior and deduces, with withering accuracy, that this expectant dogfather is actually a cat person. (O’Connor is good with brothers; his best work remains Warrior, in which Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy played feuding MMA fighters.)
It’s all very sweet. So why does The Accountant 2 insist on pivoting in its third act into a sweaty thriller, culminating in one of those endless shootouts where anonymous henchmen are slaughtered in a hail of bullets and grenades? The answer, I suspect, is one of anticipated audience expectations; the first Accountant was essentially an action flick, so O’Connor and Dubuque felt compelled to orient its follow-up in the same direction. Fine, but that doesn’t excuse the lackluster choreography or the complete lack of tension. Ultimately, the one fraudster Christian can’t apprehend is The Accountant 2 itself. When deciding what type of entertainment it wanted to be, this faintly charming, painfully overburdened movie checked the wrong box.
Grade: C+
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.