Review: THE ACCOUNTANT 2

 by Rob DiCristino

In which he does no accounting.

Gavin O’Connor’s 2016 thriller The Accountant holds a very special place in my personal cinematic canon. That’s not because it's a particularly good movie — it isn’t — but because it’s the only on-screen pairing to date of my favorite working movie stars, Ben Affleck and Anna Kendrick. Neither of them turns in a marquee performance, of course: Kendrick is doing Flustered Mouse, which may have earned her an Oscar nomination for Up in the Air but always robs her of the wit and charisma she brings to better roles. Affleck, on the other hand, is trapped in a sad-sack purgatory between Batman and The Way Back, a mode that forces him to lean on the two most debilitating weak spots in his craft: subtlety and nuance. In retrospect, autistic assassin Christian Wolff may not be the best role for an actor who’s built an empire on his shit-eating grin. But despite these flaws — not to mention an overstuffed plot and a depiction of neurodiversity that leaves more than a bit to be desired — The Accountant does just enough right to be watchable.

Opening eight years after that film’s dramatic conclusion — we all remember how The Accountant ended, right? — The Accountant 2 begins with former Treasury Department director Roy King’s (J.K. Simmons) murder at the hands of a mysterious assassin (Daniella Pineda). As King’s protégé-turned-successor Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) picks up the pieces, she discovers a parting note scrawled on King’s arm: “Find the accountant.” Sending a coded message through Harbor Neuroscience — the Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters of the Accountant universe — Medina recruits Wolff’s (Affleck) help tracking down the identity of the killer, eventually uncovering a conspiracy connected to Central American human trafficking. But with Medina unwilling to get her hands dirty and Wolff unable to blend in the criminal underworld, the pair find themselves in need of a wild card: Enter the bon vivant Braxton (Jon Bernthal), Wolff’s estranged hitman brother. Headshots, knife fights, and sibling squabbles ensue.

The Accountant might be most generously described as a battle between nature and nurture, a story about weakness being hammered into strength through cruelty and blunt force. Christian and Braxton each compensate for childhood abuses in their own way, as Christian chisels his autism into “normalcy” while Braxton fills his emptiness with violence. By the end, Christian’s friendship with Dana (Kendrick) and reunion with Braxton have introduced a third, more balanced path for them both. The Accountant 2 headfakes toward this continuity by introducing Christian at a speed dating event and Braxton bartering for a miniature corgi, but that’s about all the room Bill Dubuque’s screenplay has for character work before the mystery plot takes over. From there, the film relies almost exclusively on Bernthal’s devastating magnetism — his penchant for snacking in nearly every scene recalls Brad Pitt in the Ocean’s movies — to sprinkle a dull slog through parking garages and motel rooms with some kind of movie magic.

And while Dubuque’s design for Wolff seems rooted in a questionable understanding of autism spectrum disorder — and considering that the “spectrum-y super-genius” trope plays even worse in an era (era) when the American government is targeting autistic people for extermination — the first Accountant at least took pains to depict him as a sympathetic human being. Affleck wiggles decent texture out of his scenes with Bernthal and Kendrick, playing Wolff’s awkwardness as both a symptom of his condition and a response to his trauma. But whether it be because his character takes a backseat in this sequel — again, Bernthal gives it a pulse, while Addai-Robinson does all the plotty grunt work — or because Affleck made a choice that O’Connor was too timid or inept to correct, the actor turns in an unequivocally horrendous performance this time around, morphing Wolff’s understated cadence into an impression of Stephen Root in Office Space. It’s an absolute catastrophe that derails what little else the film has going for it.

What else does The Accountant 2 have going for it? Not too much. Fittingly distributed in the States by Amazon/MGM — who acquired the franchise from Warner Bros. in 2024 — it plays as a backdoor pilot for the kind of uninspired, Jack Ryan-esque Original Streaming Series that will keep its overqualified actors from more worthy projects for the foreseeable future. Its characters are forgettable — I’d list its cavalcade of bald-headed, gold-chained gangsters if I could differentiate their faces or names in the film’s press notes — and its exhaustive use of headshots leads me believe that the production got some sort of squib-related tax credit from the state of California. Worst of all, the original film’s argument for the power of neurodiversity is diluted down to “these kids are good with computers,” a missed opportunity in an age when, again, the neurodiverse could really use an ally. Also, where the fuck is Anna Kendrick’s character? That oversight should have disqualified this whole endeavor from the very beginning.

The Accountant 2 hits US theaters on Friday, April 25th.