'The Accountant 2' A Review

The Accountant 2 is an action movie, a sequel to the 2016 original. Christian(Ben Affleck), the titular Accountant, gets roped into investigating a convoluted human trafficking/child imprisonment ring by his former frenemy at FinCEN Medina(Cynthia Addai-Robinson). He calls in his brother Braxton(Jon Bernthal) for back up.

Affleck gives Christian a little less stoic menace and a little more personality and eccentricity which is great. Same with Bernthal who allows Braxton to be less cool and more depth. Both give oddly emotional performances, odd in that the emotion is genuinely potent in the scenes with the two of them(together or separate) not being violent. There's a great scene at a honky-tonk another as they sit on top of Christian's airstream and have a beer. But these hang-out scenes are extremely at odds with mowing down human traffickers across the boarder and freeing kids as they are literally being put into a mass grave. Addai-Robinson does well but the script makes her hammer by-the-bookness which feels bizarrely preachy and, again, tonally discordant. Daniella Pineda as a rival assassin/fixer is good but her storyline just kinda adds to the circuitousness of the plot. The big surprise and delight is how front and center autism is and how it's framed as a superpower not only with Christian but backed up by his handler Justine played by Allison Robertson and a room full of hacker kids all of whom are on the spectrum. It's good casting and this pretty mainstream B level action movie actually feels like it has something powerful to say in this respect given recent comments by RFKJr.

The action is competently shot but this, like many sequels and action movies in general, fails to understand bigger is not necessarily better, making the stakes BIG sometimes back fires. The best piece of action is Christian beating up security in a pizza factory not the climactic battle which kinda looks like it'd have been more appropriate in an Iraq War movie. Still you can at least see the action and it is something both Affleck and Bernthal excel at. The real issue is simply the tone is inconsistent but, in aggregate, it works.

Surprisingly effective and fun when it goes intimate and emotional, unsurprisingly flabby and unwieldy when it attempts to go beyond that.

Currently in theaters.

Rent It.