No matter how many ways you crunched the numbers, it was still a surprise to hear that Ben Affleck hitman-with-autism movie, The Accountant, was going to get a belated sequel. I mean, if you add up the figures, it had been nine years since Gavin O’connor’s gimmicky but slick thriller had graced screens which seems a strange amount of time to elapse before forging on with a follow up. Still, the gang’s all here and raring to go on another curiously complex ride as the titular accountant, Christian Wolff, continues to struggle with human behavior while yet another criminal conspiracy suddenly comes knocking on the door of his luxury trailer.
However, even though the premise of the original was fairly intriguing (think Rain Man meets any action thriller made over the last twenty years), I didn’t exactly find The Accountant to be super memorable so can the sequel divide the difference and carry the two in order to make the concept finally claim some dividends?
We return to the rather lonely life of Christian Wolff to find that he’s still living an extremely economical life as he still straightens out the financial accounts of various crime organisations while living simply in his motor home. However, after years of living a solitary life after not patching things up with his hitman brother, Braxton, it seems that Christian is finally desperate for some companionship and we find him even trying speed dating after cheating the algorithm of a dating app.
His fruitless search for a date has to be put on hold, however, when a face from his past manages to get in contact with him in the form of deputy director of FinCEN, Marybeth Medina. It seems that her old boss, Raymond King, had run into some trouble while investigating the disappearance of a Salvadorean family and after trying to secure the services of a mysterious assassin known only as Anaïs, is shot down by a gang of heavies hoping to shut him up – but not before ge scrawled to words “Find the accountant” on his arm in pen.
Before you know it, Christian and Medina has formed an uneasy alliance in order to investigate the murder, but after Christian’s meticulous nature and his online backup supplied by the kids at the institute of Harbour Neuroscience manages to unearth a bunch of secrets, they both realise that what they’re looking into is far bigger that they first thought and that extra muscle is required.
Enter Braxton who takes time out of his busy assassin schedule (lot of assassins in this film) to impatiently heed his brother’s call and possibly try to understand his brother’s complex condition despite have a fuse shorter than a cocktail weiner.
As the mismatched group try to figure out what a mysterious hitwoman, a missing family and a prostitution ring with brutal methods all have in common, soon the guns come out and the real accounting comes into play.
While a lot of movies still push the autism = superpower trope from time to time, at least The Accountant actually took the time and effort to create a complex backstory for Ben Affleck’s nurodivergent anti-hero to not lapse into parody. We got his troubled childhood, we saw him with numbers and we also saw him awkwardly bond with Anna Kendrick, but apart from that, we also got a look into his private life, his proficient killing skills and the fact that he has considerable online backup in the form of a group of similarly autistic children led by his own girl in the chair, Justine. While this meant that The Accountant sometimes moved a little slow for my tastes from time to time, it also means that The Accountant 2 (or ² depending on where you read it) doesn’t have to establish all of these things again and is therefore free to plow ahead with a whole new plot unencumbered by having to set all this stuff up. As a result, the sequel sticks mostly to what worked from the first film and as a result, ends up being a better film for it as the original concept is allowed to breathe in a far more relaxed way. If course when I say “what worked”, what I mean is we get much more of both Affleck and Jon Bernthal on the screen together which is when O’Connor’s original attempt truly sprang into life proper.
While the film doesn’t quite give us the Rain Man with guns road trip we seemingly all want to see, it’s still smart enough to make the main hook of its story the long gestating reunion of Christian and Braxton which proves to be every inch as fun as you would hope. In fact, “fun” is something else the sequel brings to the party as while The Accountant had its monents of comic relief (namely the weapons grade awkwardness between Affleck and Kendrick), this new installment allows its lead to have way more fun in his role while never actually making fun of his condition.
Obviously any double act involving Bernthal as a dickish younger brother getting increasingly frustrated trying to figure his sibling out is going to bring a fair amount of roguish chuckles, but Affleck is given more chance to dodge the straight man role with an early scene where he well and truly bombs at a speed dating night. However, it’s a later moment where some line dancing enters the story (stay with me now) that really sees the movie fully hit its stride and give us one of the greatest freeze frames of recent memory and the tempestuous relationship between the two brothers ends up being so strong, you don’t actually mind if we drag our heels getting back to the thriller stuff.
Of course, we eventually do and while it’s engrossing in a sprawling kind of way that involves plenty of strange twists (chiefly involving Daniella Pineda’s steely, Terminator-esque assasin) and much hand wringing by Cynthia Addai-Robins’ agent after she vehemently opposes the lawless methods her new partner tend to use, to be honest, you’d just rather watch Christian and Braxton alternate between bonding and getting on each other’s tits a bit more. Still, matters end in a mad rush to save the day against a child napping sex ring, but it’s here where The Accountant 2 tends to stumble over its own storylines as various plot threads clash and bounce off one another in order to get to a big, climactic shootout. Medina quits around halfway through, leaving Addai-Robbins rather central character suddenly surplus to requirements; the villains aren’t really fleshed out to the point where they’re actual threats and the film focuses on one specific child in peril among the group to make us care more, but because there’s no real connection between the kid and Christian other than they both have autism, it feels like a forced plot thread too far – I mean, isn’t saving children from a mass grave heroic enough that they have to have an extra motive?
Perkier, funnier and more endearing that the first movie, Accountant 2 still slightly struggles when it comes to giving us exactly what we want. However, I concede that watching Bernthal coo over a stray cat like a furry orange baby and watching Affleck bust moves in a honky tonk bar in giant puffy trainers come pretty damn close…
But still, next time give us that Wolff Brothers road trip, you cowards!
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