Sequel logic typically dictates doubling down on what worked the first time around, but there are exceptions. For instance, there is not an awful lot of accounting in The Accountant 2. This time out, Ben Affleck’s Christian Wolff—the autistic number cruncher introduced in Gavin O’Connor’s preposterous 2016 thriller—is too busy line dancing, motorcycling, and firing semiautomatic weapons to worry about percentages and deductions. At one point, Christian does use his savant-like math skills to nail a pizzeria proprietor who’s skimming off the top. He then uses his similarly sophisticated hand-to-hand combat skills to beat the crap out of him. Instead of standing up for cash-strapped small business owners à la the first film, Christian takes them apart piece by piece. “I’m going to dislocate your shoulder,” he deadpans before wrenching the bone out of the socket. “It’s very painful.”
Such poker-faced sadism is the house style here. When the first Accountant emerged as a surprise crowd-pleaser—and a crucial entry in Affleck’s highly variable action-hero portfolio—it tapped pleasure centers heretofore undreamed of. It was a white-collar riff on John Wick pitched on a razor’s edge between brain-dead stupidity and knowing camp, a movie in which Ben Affleck proudly shows Anna Kendrick his pocket protector in what constitutes a meet-cute. The film also spurred controversy for its treatment of autism, specifically for the implicit conflation of neurodivergence with killer instinct. “Certainly, I had conversations about the potential perspective people could have on this character, vis-a-vis some of the violence in the film,” said O’Connor in an interview with USA Today. “But I took great sensitivity making sure the script was bulletproof so that the audience would understand what's motivating the violence.”
Calling a movie as fundamentally goofy as The Accountant “sensitive” was a stretch. Nevertheless, the film’s efforts to contextualize and sympathize with Christian’s condition while highlighting his spectacular abilities as a forensic detective were at least ostensibly in good faith. “Our hope,” said Affleck, “is that the people in that community, on the spectrum of autism, like the movie, and like that it’s a superhero story about them.”
This time out, the idea of Wolff as a righteous, larger-than-life crusader is made explicit. Having seemingly cut ties with the organized criminals who previously exploited his skill set—while steadily liquidating their ill-gotten gains—he’s a free agent, which means speed dating and eating endearingly symmetrical breakfasts in his beloved Airstream while waiting for his Treasury Department handlers to activate him for assignments. Cue J.K. Simmons as the sly Financial Crimes Enforcement Network honcho Raymond King, a carryover from the first film. He’s on-screen just long enough to get picked off by a mysterious sniper, who, as it transpires, may have had his sights set on Ray’s contact, a young woman with a shady past. At the morgue, a doctor notices that Ray had scribbled a message into his arm as a last request: “Find the accountant.”
Contacting Christian means plugging into a high-tech surveillance network run secretly out of a neuroscientific research center populated with preternaturally gifted preteen hackers, a conceit that recalls Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. After Ray’s successor, Marybeth (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), connects with him, Christian draws a series of links between the shooting and a Central American child-trafficking ring whose prisoners include a boy who, he discovers, is autistic himself. From there, the outrageous plot points proliferate, one after the other, until an entire television season’s worth of narrative information has been compressed into two hectic and occasionally hysterical hours. O’Connor isn’t a particularly distinctive filmmaker; his best movie remains the MMA melodrama Warrior, which dug deep into fractured family dynamics and earned Nick Nolte a well-deserved Oscar nomination for his role as an irascible patriarch trying to live down his own legacy of abuse while his sons battle in the octagon.
There’s a sibling rivalry subplot in The Accountant 2 as well, and it’s by far the best part of the movie, pairing Affleck with Jon Bernthal as Christian’s younger brother, Braxton, an elite assassin who’s spent his life sticking up for his brother and wishing he got more gratitude for it. Bernthal was also in the first movie, but the character existed around the edges of the story. Now he’s a full-fledged wacky sidekick, and Bernthal—who’s got expert comic timing—makes a meal of his dialogue. Whenever Christian and Braxton are hanging out and shooting the shit, you can see the kind of wry, bruising buddy comedy that O’Connor and screenwriter Bill Dubuque probably thought they were making. But even allowing for a certain level of baseline tastelessness in a contemporary Hollywood action movie, The Accountant 2 is nasty stuff. In lieu of white-collar criminals and corrupt robotics manufacturers, we get faceless gang members in Mexico and an extended set piece in which a group of children get herded, at gunpoint, into a freshly dug mass grave. Say what you will about The Beekeeper, but its reactionary, anti–deep state paranoia was at least fun and wildly stylized, not to mention that the film committed to truth in advertising by actually having Jason Statham keep some bees.
Obviously, the plan to release The Accountant 2 in April coincides with the height of tax season; that sound you hear is CPAs everywhere leaving the office early to get in line. The film is also timely in an unexpected and uncomfortable way, arriving in the shadow of the Trump administration’s proposal for a national “autism registry,” a scheme steeped in stigmatizing language and misinformation. In a press conference last week, Secretary of Health Robert Kennedy Jr. stated that many people with autism will “never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date,” earning broad condemnation from activists, medical professionals, and autistic people.
Between the profit-sharing structure of his startup studio, Artists Equity (which helped to produce The Accountant 2), and his ongoing condemnations of Donald Trump’s presidency, Affleck has historically shown a willingness to get political. Assuming that The Accountant 2 does well enough to justify fast-tracking a Part 3, maybe there’d be some money in a story where Christian really starts punching up by facing off with an RFK Jr. stand-in (Jon Hamm might be available to play him after his performance in SNL’s “The White Potus”). Or maybe the Accountant could use his big brain to sort out the tariff situation once and for all.