Director: Gavin O’Connor Starring: Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, J.K. Simmons, Daniela Pineda, Robert Morgan Running Time: 124 minutes
We have already seen a fair share of sequels produced for the movies of 2016. M. Night Shyamalan’s psychological horror Split was followed by Glass in 2019. Fantastic Beasts and Deadpool both launched financially successful franchises in 2016, as did cult horror film Terrifier. Crossover hit Korean zombie film Train to Busan was sequelised in 2020 with Peninsula. Both Disney Animation Studios films from 2016 have gotten sequels with Moana 2 arriving last year and Zootopia 2 coming later this year. Bizarrely, even Rogue One, which seemed to have a definitive ending, got a sequel with Star Wars: A New Hope.
One film which, despite its financial success (recouping $156 million on a budget of $44 million) did not seem ripe for revisiting was the Gavin O’Connor-directed, Ben Affleck-starring action film The Accountant.
Most people remember bullet points about The Accountant. Ben Affleck is an accountant. He does accountancy for the mob. He is autistic in a very mannered, deliberate ‘Hollywood’ way. He kills people by using his neurodivergence to make him a kind of super soldier. His brother is Jon Bernthal, who is an assassin. If you remembered even some of these details nine years later, well done. I didn’t before rewatching it.
Also in the mix is an extremely convoluted backstory about Affleck’s character Christian Wolff’s mother abandoning their family and his military father using the power of combat training to help his neurodivergent son ‘cope with the world’. Furthermore there is a somewhat confusing prison stint seen in flashback during which the previously anti-social Wolff befriends a mob accountant, takes over his business, and subsequently covertly feeds information about his new dastardly clients to J.K. Simmons’ Treasury Agent Ray King, which elevates King from a schlubby middle-manager to the Deputy Head of the Treasury Agency. Bill Dubuque’s script is so in love with its lead character’s backstory that the actual present circumstances in which we meet him are yadda yadda’d: there’s some shady dealings in a robotics company run by John Lithgow, Wolff investigates, kills a lot of people and reunites with his brother.
Great stuff. Fun, dumb movie, mission accomplished. Can I please now have a sequel to Shane Black’s superb 2016 buddy cop comedy The Nice Guys?
No such luck.
The Accountant 2 begins with Deputy Head of the Treasury Marybeth Medina (Rings of Power‘s Cynthia Addai-Robinson reprising her role from the first film) discovering that her predecessor and mentor Ray King has been murdered while investigating a missing person’s case related to an immigrant family from El Salvador (a weighty plot-point in the current political climate) and has left instructions for her to find Christian Wolff to assist in the completion of the case. Feeling the need of extra help, Wolff also brings in his brother Braxton, hoping to repair their relationship after seemingly disappearing in the eight interim years between the two films. Their quest finds them at cross purposes with human trafficker Burke (Robert Morgan), his hired gun (Grant Harvey) and a mysterious assassin (Daniela Pineda).
After seeing that most of the principal cast had returned, my sole concern was that Dubuque and O’Connor would eschew the first film’s enjoyable blend of close-quarters action, flashbacks laden with pseudoscience, and Affleck hilariously trying to pitch how much ‘autism stuff’ he wants to include into any scene, for grittier or more serious filmmaking. Thankfully, The Accountant 2 does nothing to mess with the formula from the first film, and even doubles down on it. It has the same dizzying number of flashbacks and the same overlong second act leading to a rapid finale. It has the same high body count and the same tightly-shot action by O’Connor. But it also has a bizarre scene of Christian Wolff doing speed-dating and being lusted over by a large group of horny single women, and an even more bizarre scene where Bernthal, clad in only boxers and socks and holding a pistol, has a heated phone conversation about adopting a dog. It gives Marybeth Medina an arc that centres primarily on her choosing an office chair. It is breathtakingly silly in these moments and, just as he did in the first film, Dubuque gets to the 1hr 15mins mark before he remembers that Christian and Braxton actually have to do…something…rescue someone?…Ah let’s send ’em to Mexico.
Affleck’s career choices continue to fascinate me. After emerging a broken shell of a man from the Snyder-Verse, supporting roles in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel and in his own film Air gave the impression that he finally understood that his greatest success lies in him playing a wiseass-with-a-heart-of-gold in supporting roles. It worked in Good Will Hunting. It worked in Shakespeare in Love. It even worked recently in the otherwise atrociously boring 2022 George Clooney-directed Amazon film The Tender Bar. And yet, in between, he couldn’t help but chase leading parts that he was totally ill-equipped for such as in Adrian Lyne’s (semi-)erotic thriller Deep Water, and in Robert Rodriguez’s woeful 2023 film Hypnotic. Affleck has not, and likely never will, face up to the fact that the one time he has made sense in a lead role was in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, in which he plays a guy who is, somewhat unintentionally, a big, dumb, self-centred sad-sack. However, since the success of the first Accountant film, he has spoken effusively about the role of Christian Wolff, and his desire to reprise it. It would be a stretch to call his performance in either movie “good” or “well-crafted” or indeed “sensitive to autistic people”, but amazingly, he still manages to pull it off.
Part of what makes his performance work is his interplay with Bernthal who, as he was in the first film, is the standout performer here. He plays Braxton as a sort of combination of Tom Cruise’s Vincent from Collateral and Colin Farrell’s Ray from In Bruges – an unhinged weirdo murderer who’s also a softboi who loves his brother and furry animals. It’s a performance that reminds you that despite his success in playing tough guys like The Punisher, Bernthal is best utilised as a gregarious wiseguy whose facade belies a deep soulfulness, not dissimilar to Affleck’s own 90s persona. His application of this to Braxton’s arc is what keeps the film on the rails, and when we tire of trying to understand the villain’s business model or what “Acquired Savant Syndrome” is (besides an example of an acronym accurately evaluating a concept), we can fall back on enjoyable scenes of Bernthal and Affleck squabbling over the fact that the latter never calls or which of them leads the more ‘normal’ lifestyle.
The potential success of this film is an interesting prospect. The shoot-em-up action genre has mostly been relegated to streaming services now, aptly demonstrated by the fact that another film also opening on April 25th is Havoc, directed by Gareth Evans of The Raid film series and starring Tom Hardy, which is operating in the same genre, but debuting exclusively on Netflix. However, the small number of films in this genre that are still released theatrically have continued to do reliable business, such as Monkey Man, The Beekeeper and Bad Boys: Ride or Die which all over-performed last year relative to expectations. The Accountant 2 being a sequel could plausibly work for or against it, though I will here dispel any hesitation that its sequel status may inspire: you do NOT need to have seen The Accountant to understand The Accountant 2.
If your Friday evening choice is between seeing this or watching Havoc at home, I would highly recommend making the trip to your local cinema. One of the great shames of the streaming era is that action and comedy, which play really well on a big screen in a crowded theatre, have been transformed into passive home viewing experiences as you Google things like “ben affleck dating history”. And if we keep turning up to cinemas for these sequels to 2016 movies, maybe one day we’ll finally get that long-awaited follow-up to The Nice Guys.
(3 / 5)