No ‘Accountant’ For Taste

The arrival of The Accountant 2—filing a return nine years after its predecessor—is as unexpected as the fussy autistic bookkeeper-assassin who headlines it. But the brooding 2016 actioner The Accountant, a mild box office hit, has had a surprisingly robust home-video existence in that intervening decade. And that kind of afterlife still makes a persuasive impact on Hollywood’s IP actuarial tables. Some bean-counter agreed that a sequel would be money in the bank, as long as the movie maybe lightened up and dropped the self-serious gloom.  

Which explains the skewed tonal shift in The Accountant 2, a hokey-jokey brother-bond crime drama that uses Central American human trafficking as a thematic human shield to hide its own fundamental frivolity. Overcomplicated plotting and a mysterious killer known as Anaïs (Daniuella Pineda) are the overwrought filigree to the film’s real purpose, which is to watch Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal ham it up as odd-couple siblings.

THE ACCOUNTANT 2 ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: James Hawes
Written by: Bill Dubuque
Starring: Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Daniella Pineda, J.K. Simmons
Running time: 132 mins

A quick recap for those unfamiliar with the first movie’s backstory: titular Christian Wolff (Affleck) and his little bro Braxton (Jon Bernthal) survived a traumatic army-brat childhood of intense and arguably abusive combat training, thanks to a single-minded single dad who Great Santini’ed his way into a lot of questionable parental decisions. It was his way of coping when raising a first-born son manifesting savant-level prowess with numbers and patterns, but not exactly keen on conventional social cues.

Brax was more affected by the family disfunction and compartmentalized his emotions by becoming a first-tier mercenary. Chris, meanwhile, ended up in prison, fell in cahoots with mafiosos, and cooked their books so successfully that they showered him with felonious wealth—not to mention the odd Pollock and Renoir. He thrived by laundering money though creative number-crunching and maintaining a solitary criminal existence that included stashing his high-powered weaponry, fake passports, miscellaneous fine art, and cash reserves in an Airstream covertly parked in a non-descript storage-unit facility. 

In The Accountant, gung-ho Treasury Director Ray King (J.K. Simmons) was obsessed with tracking down Chris, and enlisted deputy director Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to help him. By that film’s end, Chris had neutralized King and Medina’s interest by becoming a T-Man informant and continuing to avoid detection. In The Accountant 2, now-retired King ends up dead after working a pro-bono missing-persons case. FIND THE ACCOUNTANT, he writes on his arm before being killed. Medina honors his dying wish and gets Chris to team up in the hunt for an El Salvadorian family fleeing MS-13. And Chris calls a visibly resentful Brax—currently in Berlin as part of an elite European kill squad—to drop everything and help him. 

Which is why Chris goes line dancing at a country-music bar! Also, speed-dating in Boise, Idaho! And that’s why Brax just wants to get a puppy Corgi! And why the brothers sit on folding chairs atop Chris’ classic Airstream and get into heavy conversations about their feelings! 

Aren’t there missing people to find? Oh, right, the damaged duo needs to process all that estrangement and find a way back into each other’s lives that feels emotionally safe—before, of course, they go on a paramilitary shooting spree in Juarez. Because it’s all about saving the kids, right? Or human trafficking in general, or fighting MS-13? Whatever, there are bad guys, okay? And fighting them helps the brothers work through their issues. So don’t sweat the details.

 The Accountant 2 has an empty conscience and an empty moral compass, using its performative sympathy for autistic people as an excuse to transform them into superhero-level problem solvers and Terminator-style avengers. It even introduces a new neuroscientific category: Acquired Savant Syndrome, where blunt-force trauma can turn anyone into an on-the-spectrum amnesiac genius. Of course, the one who suffers from it in this movie automatically becomes a John Wick-level killing machine. Which is handy if you don’t want to lose your action audience completely.

Bill Dubuque’s empathetic but melancholic screenplay for the first film created a weirdly compelling and deeply lonely world where high-functioning misfits do their best to damage-control their impulses and struggle to be functional, almost resigned to the fact that they won’t achieve—or even feel like they deserve—happiness. The Accountant 2 gleefully, even cynically, abandons those heavy ideas for low-hanging broheim head-butting, shooting sprees with unsettling body counts, and a rapport that turns Chris into a watered-down Rain Man. Gavin O’Conner’s direction here is less ambitious, too: his artful and considered technique in the initial movie now seems looser, less thoughtful, and more workmanlike. Why the shift? There’s no accounting for taste.