The Accountant 2 Doubles The Ludicrous Fun Of The Original
The sequel dances the line between absurd and awesome.
No one would call The Accountant a massive success when it premiered back in 2016. If the Ben Affleck crime thriller about an autistic criminal accountant made any kind of impression, it was for the controversy it kicked up over its “autism as a superpower” hook — a fairly ridiculous depiction of savant syndrome that was considered a retrograde stereotype long before The Accountant revived it. It might’ve been destined to fade away into obscurity like many other wannabe franchise starters, if not for the second life it found on streaming. Somehow, The Accountant became one of Affleck’s most popular thrillers, leading to a sequel being greenlit a whopping eight years after the original hit theaters.
It was an announcement that was met with many raised eyebrows — after all, who was asking for a sequel to The Accountant? It seems that director Gavin O’Connor, and producer and star Affleck, are keenly aware of that reaction, because The Accountant 2 doubles down on the strangest and most ludicrous parts of the original, resulting in a sequel that is wildly more fun, even more absurd, and disarmingly emotional.
Cynthia Addai-Robinson gets to play the straitlaced straight man to Ben Affleck’s Christian Wolff and Jon Bernthal’s Braxton.
The Accountant 2 (or, as it’s also called, The Accountant Squared) picks up eight years after the events of the first film, with the now retired Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) director Raymond King (J.K. Simmons) found dead after an apparent targeted attack. The only clue as to why is a hastily scribbled message on his arm: “Find the accountant.” Troubled by the suspicious circumstances of his demise, now-FinCEN director Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) finds herself with no choice but to seek out Christian Wolff (Affleck), the criminal accountant whom she had chased around the country at the start of her career. Though Christian is reluctant, she manages to secure his help with a question he can’t help but be intrigued by: “Do you like puzzles?”
And the plot of The Accountant 2 is certainly a puzzler. The central storyline pertains to what Raymond King was investigating, which Marybeth and Christian discover are a series of murders around the globe who all seem to be connected to one person, an assassin known as Anaïs (an ultra-cool Danielle Pineda). And Anaïs just happens to be the last person that Raymond met before he got assassinated. With their case taking a turn into the seedy underbelly of hitmen and assassins, Christian calls up the one person he knows from that world: his brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal). This is where the semblance of a coherent plot disintegrates, but also where The Accountant 2 becomes undeniably awesome.
The buddy comedy between Affleck and Bernthal is the highlight of the film.
O’Connor and screenwriter Bill Dubuque seem aware that the plot isn’t what people come to The Accountant for, so they abandon all pretense of trying to create a movie that’s at all connected to complex financial conspiracies (Affleck does precious little accounting in this movie). Instead, they introduce plot threads about human trafficking, global assassination plots, and people with “acquired savant syndrome” (a very real phenomenon that is given the classic ludicrous Accountant treatment). And that’s before we even get to the X-Men-style school of autistic savant children who help Christian’s hacker friend track down the baddies. But this overstuffed, borderline nonsensical, plot is clearly not where O’Connor’s focus lies. Instead, it’s in the brotherly dynamic between Affleck’s Christian and Bernthal’s Braxton. The plot takes a backseat to Christian and Braxton’s road trip adventures, in which the estranged brothers bond, bicker, and realize how much they mean to each other. And it’s in Affleck and Bernthal’s dynamic that the sequel finds its identity as a full-fledged buddy comedy.
After the film teases us with an entertaining, but somewhat standard, straitlaced hero/stoic anti-hero dynamic between Marybeth and Christian, Bernthal enters the film with his sleazy, macho charisma on full blast. Bernthal nails a lazy, easy kind of menace in this role — constantly eating something and obsessing over cute animals, while ruthlessly dispatching his targets. It’s the kind of scene-stealing performance that Bernthal has cornered lately, and O’Connor wisely lets the actor run wild with it.
Does anyone do any accounting in this movie?
But while Bernthal is the MVP of the movie, The Accountant 2 is Affleck’s film. Affleck leans into some rare physical comedy with this one, first with a hilarious speed-dating scene in which he practices smiling for a gaggle of eager women with increasingly unhinged results, then in the standout sequence of the movie in which Affleck’s Christian Wolff line-dances for the first time. That’s right, Affleck, who notably learned the Indonesian martial art pencak silat for the first film, learns line-dancing for the sequel, in a hysterical, incredible sequence that brings the plot to a screeching halt. It’s a silly, ridiculously fun scene that embodies The Accountant 2’s whole tone: it’s so stupid, it circles back around to being great.
And what better kind of tone to nail than the awesomely stupid, “dudes rock” attitude that made the first Accountant a sleeper hit amongst dads everywhere? The Accountant 2 may not be smart cinema, but it smartly pivots to what its audience cares about. And it’s Ben Affleck line dancing in orthopedic shoes before gunning down a gang of human traffickers.
