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An Unwelcome Audit

If Ben Affleck was pushing it by playing an autistic character in 2016, it is even less justifiable in 2025. The Accountant came out nine years ago. It was a decent enough success and did modestly well with critics (I was not one of them), and while I can recall some talk of a sequel, it didn’t seem to manifest in short order and the best window for it passed probably by 2019. The movie itself is not memorable enough to warrant the anticipation any longer. But Ben Affleck and director Gavin O’Connor clearly wanted to make one, and the pair of them -though Affleck especially- had the pull to make it happen.
The Accountant 2, irrespective of its connection to the first movie, feels like a film that would have been made in maybe the mid-2000s. That it is coming at this time is rather odd, not only given its disregard for the modern faux pas of depicting autism in a very stereotypically savant-type way, but its conflict and aesthetics, its character and narrative choices feel out of date, and not for the most part in a charming throwback sense. Only the tenor of its humour feels decidedly modern.
Centering on the disappearance of a Salvadorean family of refugees, The Accountant 2 reintroduces Affleck’s Christian Wolff, the autistic mathematical genius and elite combatant, now living nomadically out of his trailer, when he is consulted by the financial crimes agency to investigate this case and find what is left of that family. Under threat by a cartel network of assassins, covering up a related conspiracy, he reunites with his estranged brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal), a notorious hitman himself -the two repairing their relationship as they, using each their own expertise, uncover the truth.
This movie has nearly twice the budget of its predecessor, but immediately feels like the weaker, cheaper sequel. Where the supporting cast of the original movie was filled out by names like Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, Jeffrey Tambor, and John Lithgow, nobody around Affleck and Bernthal here matches such a level of notoriety or credibility. Simmons does come back for a cameo role in the opening before being killed off; nobody afterwards commands anywhere near the same gravitas. Cynthia Addai-Robinson takes up the role of the foil to not just one but both brothers, as Medina the straight-laced government operative, while Daniella Pineda plays a mysterious figure involved in the cover-up consistently evading surveillance and scrutiny.
Neither of these characters matter though (Pineda especially is substantially sidelined) as so much of the movie is concentrated in the brothers for what essentially amounts to the action movie variant of Rain Man. Unlike in the first film -which split time between Christian and the agents trying to understand him, the dynamic between him and Braxton is what this film is built on. Bernthal is pretty decent as the casual amoral killer who struggles with a normal life and relationships for precisely the opposite reason as his brother -and indeed he gets a few good moments through the film, much as he has to contend with some pretty egregious comic relief. Affleck however is still very awkward -not in his performance; indeed he is much too comfortable in this role, but in the series of stereotypes he regurgitates without any thought and which have no authentic connection to any form of real savant syndrome. But it allows Affleck to play quirky to his usual stoic leading man screen archetype, and so he leans in hard -especially in the last act to the contrast of these intense and violent physical skills with his strictly mild and meticulous personality.
The nature of the plot too and its implied politics are also handled dimly and poorly. The film comes across as both pro-immigrant and xenophobic, as it stirs up sympathy for the undocumented Salvadorian family that was targeted (and especially the kid who was kidnapped, and whom Christian forms an assumed kinship with), but also rolls out several stereotypes around evil Latin-American crime rings and depicts Mexico with that grungy copper filter often used to distinguish otherized countries in American films. This movie is of course only too happy to make two burlish white Americans the saviours for a rabble of trafficked kids. There is also the bizarre thing of Christian’s network of autistic children with such advanced hacking skills that they can breach the privacy of a personal computer better than even the CIA to find information on a person of interest; a beat that is both played as fairly silly and genuinely severe, as Medina’s immense discomfort with such an ethical transgression leads to her temporarily walking out of her partnership with Christian over it. O’Connor does seem to chastise Christian over these methods, alienate him a little bit more with a lack of moral clarity, but then only returns to those kids in a positive light and never touches on any accountability or consequence for Christian -in fact he goes right back to playing him as a mild-mannered nice guy who can broadly be trusted with such considerable power.
There are some moments that, notwithstanding Affleck’s performance, broach something nice or wholesome in the relationship between the brothers, such as a scene at a cowboy bar that is extremely hokey (right down to the bully getting in Christian’s face over dancing with his girl), but Bernthal makes the sequence work via his palpable enthusiasm and an earnest brotherly pride that comes across. There is also a cute freeze frame here, and occasionally O’Connor drops in some stylistic beat like this that stand out. There are a few interesting long takes for instance -one of which playing out the expected though still amusing reveal of why a girl Braxton is having a casual conversation with seems so frightened. The film is markedly more interested in comic relief than its predecessor, and O’Connor demonstrates some honest strength here.
But at most they are moments of levity, specks of brightness in a movie that is in large part drab, dated and disappointing. It doesn’t even bother much with the ‘accountant’ side of Christian’s identity -beyond a couple scenes where he deduces clues out of a couple tax forms. The action is competent at best, the emotional resolution weak, and that relationship meant to carry the film though mildly charismatic is also mostly shallow -and the whole thing of course has to contend with Affleck’s autism impression and the general clichés proffered by it. Nine years in the making for such a mediocre product.

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