The Accountant 2 Can Not Be Taken Seriously

Do not approach this sequel, starring Ben Affleck as an underworld accountant again, with any sort of sobriety. Photo: Amazon MGM Studios

The Accountant 2 cries out for a subtitle. When director Gavin O’Connor introduced the sequel to his 2016 action movie at the SXSW Film Festival last night (it hits theaters April 25), he joked that he liked to refer to it as “The Accountant Squared,” but I think we can do better. The Accountant 2: Dependency Exemption, in a nod to the daddy issues running through this now-series. Or The Accountant 2: Joint Filing, as a tribute to the fact that the follow-up is essentially a sibling buddy comedy. Anything to stress that these movies, which star Ben Affleck as underworld accountant and occasional vigilante Christian Wolff, do actually feature a surprising amount of tax talk, and also that they cannot in any way be taken seriously. Approach this new movie in particular with any sort of sobriety and you will have to ask yourself questions about whether it’s progress that a neurotypical A-lister’s interpretation of autism is now the stuff of silly action flicks instead of the kind of po-faced actorly tourism that gets applauded at awards shows for being so brave.

In a funny way, it is, in that the autistic community is as deserving of representation in the space of brutal on-screen entertainments as everyone else. Still, The Accountant 2 continues to have a very Hollywood treatment of autism, which is to say it’s as much about savantism, approaching autism as a deficit which must therefore be recompensed with some form of genius. Chris is a brilliant forensic accountant capable of parsing weeks worth of complicated bookkeeping in a night, and spotting patterns others have missed. His nonverbal handler, Justine (whose computer-generated voice continues to be provided by Alison Wright, though she’s now played by Allison Robertson), is an amazing hacker, and in the sequel she leads a crew of similarly adept young proteges at her institute for the neurodivergent, which looks more and more like Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. A child hostage that Chris fixates on, convinced from just a photo that they’re fellow travelers, displays an unusual skill for calculating distance. The Accountant 2, which was written by returning screenwriter Bill Dubuque, even includes an odd, only semi-integrated plot thread about a woman who isn’t autistic, but who lost the capacity to feel fear while gaining a talent for combat due to a brain injury.

At least the film has an enormous affection for its hero, as well as empathy about his frustrations when it comes to making himself understood and having his intentions misread. The Accountant 2 pairs Chris up with his estranged younger brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal), whose connection to Chris was a twist that played out over the course of the first film, but who in this second is called upon for help early on after Raymond King, the former FinCEN director played by J. K. Simmons, gets murdered in the opening sequence. Braxton, a globe-trotting killer for hire, is an ideal foil for Chris — a gleeful, filter-free mercenary who loves luxury goods and beating people up, but who is, like his brother, has been living a free-floating life that lacks meaningful connections. The first Accountant was essentially a dumpster remix of the operatic ode to male pain that was O’Connor’s 2011 masterpiece Warrior, and this new one is at its best when the brothers are together, bickering and bonding and hashing out long-held resentments and miscommunications. Bernthal, with his boxer’s profile and his live-wire emotions, is delightfully juvenile as Braxton, and the brashness of his performance balances out certain bigger choices Affleck makes, with mixed results.

The new movie leans into comedy in ways that veer toward the cutesy — Chris at a speed dating event, Chris at a line-dancing night — but the scenes of the brothers together are great, providing glimpses of the co-dependent boys they were before they grew into trauma-stunted men who regularly commit acts of bloodshed. On that note, the climatic action sequence is a disappointing morass of gunfire that takes place in the outskirts of Juarez, but the movie gets in some better ones earlier on, capitalizing on the contrast between Braxton’s zest for violence versus Chris’s clinical approach (the best part of Affleck’s performance in this role, aside from transmitting the character’s genuine enthusiasm for the tax code, is his dispassionate expression as he dislocates someone’s shoulder or puts two shots in someone’s body and then one more in the head). The plot, which involves a human trafficking operation, is unfolded so messily as to barely be parseable, and Cynthia Addai-Robinson returns in the utterly thankless role of Marybeth Medina, Raymond’s by-the-book successor, who is tasked with scolding and finger-wagging at the brothers while also relying on their help and using them to get others to break the rules.

But the relationship between Braxton and Chris is some good stuff — shaped in part by their differences, but also by their quiet acknowledgement that the way they were raised was fucked up, but for better or worse, shaped who they are. It’s a demonstration that O’Connor is as good with fumbling masculine bonding as he is with incoherent masculine angst. Here’s hoping he keeps it up into The Accountant 3: (Emotional) Withholding, whenever that gets made.