The Accountant 2 review – Ben Affleck’s autistic assassin returns for solid sequel

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Ben Affleck may have given up Batman, but he’s not done with superheroes. In the 2016 film The Accountant, Affleck played Christian Wolff, one of many aliases for an autistic mathematical savant who worked as a forensic accountant and money launderer for every stripe of black money organization. A plethora of confusing and/or outright sad flashbacks served as his superhero origin story: a cold military PsyOps father trained Chris, bullied for his difference and struggling with tantrums, and his neurotypical brother to become lethal fighting machines. The film, written by Bill Dubuque (co-creator of Netflix’s Ozark), treated Chris’s neurodivergence as a superpower, the key to exceptional skill in all fields – a noble intention, though one squandered by the misanthropic stupidity of everything around it.

In practice, Chris was a pretty standard-issue movie assassin, and The Accountant a solid but overly complicated and forgettable action movie that did not need nor set up a second chapter. Nevertheless, business persists. Like Another Simple Favor, this year’s SXSW opening night premiere film, The Accountant 2 is a long-gestating sequel from Amazon MGM Studios to a modest 2010s movie costarring Anna Kendrick that performed well outside of theaters; The Accountant was low-key the most-rented movie of 2017 in the US, gaining a relatively loyal if quiet following. And also like Another Simple Favor, The Accountant 2 is not so much a redux as fan service that leans into the inherent ridiculousness of the enterprise. The Accountant 2, which reunites Dubuque with director Gavin O’Connor, is an even more convoluted, impenetrable, outlandish spectacle of male hyper-competence than its predecessor, doubling down on what one might call divorced dad camp.

That’s mostly for the better. The Accountant 2 is a more fun affair than The Accountant, if you’re a fan of very loud shoot ’em ups, nonsensical crime webs and rogue good guys fighting obviously very bad guys, though this outing is sadly missing Anna Kendrick. (Her Dana, Chris’s erstwhile accounting accomplice/romantic interest, is presumably living well outside Chicago.) Chris, meanwhile, has spent the intervening eight years – the sequel was in development for at least six – keeping to himself in his Airstream of black-market alternative payments. He’s still receiving arrangements from his handler Justine (Allison Robertson), a nonverbal autistic savant based at the Harbor Neuroscience treatment center in New Hampshire, but mostly laying low in Boise.

Chris gets back in the action game, however, at the call of Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), a former ally of sorts from the treasury department’s financial crimes enforcement office, who all inexplicably have guns and combat training. The death of someone close to both plunges them into an investigation that involves, in no particular order: an organized crime network based out of a fish shop; Central American human trafficking gangs; the cruelties of the migrant journey from El Salvador to Texas; a series of high-profile hits around the world; one missing autistic youth in Juarez; and an elusive assassin known as Anaïs (Daniella Pineda). I’m not explaining more for the sake of spoilers and because I genuinely could not follow the labyrinthine and once again poorly integrated plot, but suffice to say, it’s both a lot and inconsequential. The plot is not the point. The point is that Chris calls on his estranged hitman brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) for assistance, allowing for the film’s chief pleasure: two macho actors chopping it up as brothers who don’t know how to be brothers. Just two lifelong loners – no partners, no kids, no friends, no dependents – wondering if they’re happy.

The Accountant had an air of overweening self-seriousness to its proceedings, occasionally leavened by Chris’s inability to read social cues (with Affleck’s performance of neurodivergence boiling down to just avoiding eye contact); the sequel attempts more goodnatured humor, laughing with Chris’s idiosyncrasies – hacking a dating algorithm but struggling with the dates, figuring out how to line dance, continually surprising people with his Clark Kent-style pocket protector to action hero reveal. Affleck still plays Chris as a slightly more socially awkward version of an unflappable movie assassin; Bernthal, who played Braxton in the first movie with a sort of impenetrable worldly panache, goes fully off the chain, chewing every scene as a hitman of supreme confidence and desperate vulnerability who cannot sit still. Not exactly continuous, but highly watchable.

Together, the pair carry what could and nearly does devolve into an illegible pursuit of indecipherable crime under a hail of gunfire. All that, plus an Avengers-esque hub of teenage autistic savants using their special abilities to outwit and out data hunt everyone else. (“That’s my people,” says Chris.) I wouldn’t necessarily call it progressive to show neurodivergent youth hacking through every privacy law imaginable in the name of ability. But it is a nice sentiment of inclusion – the film cast many autistic actors for the roles – and a gesture at celebrating difference, though of course that difference only skews in favor of extreme skills.

Still, sentiment aside, this is a movie of cinematic adrenaline and ludicrous set-ups – ironically for its hero, stupid pleasures, but the fun kind of stupid, the kind that draws loud cheers from a crowd at a SXSW premiere and gets people streaming on the couch. It’s neither groundbreaking nor exceptional, but it does deliver above the admittedly low bar for a questionable sequel, with enough juice for another at-home hit.