While it’s only been less than a decade, it feels closer to one hundred years since the Gavin O’Connor-directed The Accountant, a surprise hit starring Oscar-winner Ben Affleck, hit North American movie theatres. An oddly misshapen, if no less entertaining, mix of mental superheroics and bone-crunching, sinew-shredding action, The Accountant passed a then-contemporary audience’s test for reality-bending escapism. Despite its box-office success, a sequel was neither necessarily warranted or — outside senior level studio offices — wanted. So whatever the reason or the rationale (money), a sequel, the aptly titled The Accountant 2, is exactly what audiences are getting this weekend and next on multiplex screens (streaming will follow shortly).
The Accountant 2 again follows the titular character, Christian Wolff (Affleck), a financial savant and forensic accountant with a genius-level IQ and military-style training courtesy of a deeply disturbed father figure, and his estranged neurotypical brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal), who has the same combat training and a long, presumably lucrative career as a private contractor and occasional hitman. Their personalities, of course, couldn’t be any more different. Where Christian can barely function in standard social situations, awkwardly attempting and often failing to make small talk, Braxton lights up every room, filling every spare second with his favourite sound in the world, his own voice.
The sequel throws out the first film’s overly complicated plotting, involving forensic accounting and financial skullduggery at a multinational corporation, and replaces it with an over-familiar human trafficking storyline involving an implacable, emotionless hit-woman, Anaïs (Daniella Pineda), a retired Fed turned private investigator, Ray King (J.K. Simmons), and the fate of a Mexican family who attempted to cross into the United States a decade earlier. For King, finding the family in the photo—or at least what happened to them—compels him to follow every clue, including a final one that leads straight to Anaïs, but ends in a hail of bullets inside a nightclub.
With King permanently indisposed, it’s up to his onetime protégé, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), to pick up the slack and find the family, less out of need than out of obligation to her late mentor. With little to go on except the phrase “Find the Accountant” scrawled on King’s lifeless arm, Medina goes against her instincts and contacts Christian, a known criminal and an international fugitive for the events depicted in the first film. For Medina, extrajudicial justice ultimately matters more to her than following the letter or even the spirit of ineffective laws that allow high-level criminals to operate with near impunity.
Once involved, Christian can’t walk away. It would be contrary to his obsessive nature, but once he realizes the nature and extent of the case, one leading not just to the long-lost Mexican family, but to a network of human traffickers working on both sides of the border, including one group that kills the men, kidnaps the children, imprisoning them in an armed compound, and forcing the women into sex work on the United States of the border.
Realizing he needs help, Christian enlists Braxton, ensuring his temporary allegiance by paying him his usual fee for private contract work. Braxton, though, apparently just needs his big brother’s love, attention, and the occasional hug. (Even private contractors, no matter how ruthless or how high the body count to their name might be, are still somewhat human.) Cue a steady stream of uncomfortable interactions between the mismatched brothers, Christian doing his level best to reconnect with his brother; Braxton needling him for his social shortcomings at every step. It’s all meant out of love, even if, as it is here, it’s completely misplaced and inappropriate.
Then again, The Accountant 2 isn’t a film based anywhere near or around the real world as we know or experience it. Certainly, real-world analogs exist on the other side of the screen, but it’s so hyper-exaggerated as to make any comparisons, not to mention any criticisms about absurd plot points or ludicrous plot turns, moot the second they’re mentioned. Nothing really, except Christian and Braxton bro-bonding over the cold-blooded extermination of mostly faceless men, some brown-hued, others lacking melanin, all who well and truly deserve to exit this mortal plane for the next as rapidly and as violently as possible.
And if that’s not enough, The Accountant 2 not only brings back Christian’s handler, Justine (Allison Robertson), a savant like Christian, who lives and works at the Harbor Neuroscience Institute in Hartford, Connecticut, with an entire squad of equally talented super-hackers. No computer system is safe from Justine and her team, and no law worth following if it gets in the way of their easily justified goals (e.g., track down missing people and places). That they’re not outfitted in X-Men-style costumes almost feels like a missed opportunity, but even for a reality-averse film like The Accountant 2, that might have been one implausibility too many. Either that or their costuming budget was too low.
The Accountant 2 opens theatrically on Friday, April 25.
