Review: 'The Accountant 2' gives Ben Affleck his action-star franchise, and all it cost him was any sense of coherence
The people in Hollywood who get worked up about A.I. replacing screenwriters should relax for a minute — because the brutal action sequel “The Accountant 2” proves, hack writers have been churning out formulaic crap like this before computers were invented.
In case you don’t remember — and I didn’t until I looked up my review from 2016 — this franchise centers on Christian Wolff, an accountant who has something called acquired savant syndrome (don’t Google the acronym), which gives him uncanny abilities to crunch numbers and outsmart algorithms. He’s also socially awkward, to the point where one might suspect he’s on the autism spectrum. (In the first movie, the script mentions autism, but no one does here, which may be an indication of how much more medical science knows about autism.)
You may also remember, though I didn’t, that in the first movie a Treasury Department agent (J.K. Simmons) and his protege (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) were on Wolff’s trail — which crosses paths with an assassin, Brax (Jon Bernthal), who turns out to be Wolff’s brother.
It would help to remember those details, because it might have given viewers a chance at understanding the sequel’s emotional stakes — something director Gavin O’Connor and screenwriter Bill Dubuque, both returning from the first film, neglect to do throughout this movie.
In the opening sequence, Simmons’ Ray King is retired from the government but occasionally taking cases as a private investigator. For his current case, trying to locate a missing Salvadoran couple and their child, he asks for help from Anaïs (Daniella Pineda), a contract killer. Before he gets far, a gang of gunmen start shooting, and King ends up dead, making Simmons the luckiest man in this movie.
King’s last act is to write a note on his arm: “Find the Accountant.” King’s old protege, Agent Marybeth Medina, is shown this message and understands what it means. Medina has moved her way up in the ranks at Treasury — though, it’s mentioned, she’s gotten tips from the mysterious network that supports Wolff’s endeavors. That network was a mystery held until the end of the first movie, and seeing it regularly in the sequel spoils the fun.
Agent Medina gets in touch with Wolff, who’s still living in an Airstream trailer with a small arsenal in the back. Wolff helps Medina sort through the clues King left behind, and gets some information about who Anaïs is — though Wolff’s methods, such as beating up suspects and having his network hack people’s computers undetected, go against her straight-arrow law enforcement sensibilities.
When the trail becomes littered with a few dead bodies, Wolff calls him some help from Brax, who’s still working as a hitman. The brothers haven’t spoken in years, which means Dubuque gets to load up on sibling distrust wrapped in action-movie bickering.
If you thought the first movie, with its arcane dive into math intercut with random bursts of gunplay, was nonsensical, you haven’t seen anything yet. “The Accountant 2” is breathtaking in the randomness of its plot points, which would start to make sense only if the filmmakers are trying to set up Wolff and his shadow network of savants as their own “X-Men” cohort.
The only reason I can see for “The Accountant 2” existing is that Affleck, who’s one of the movie’s producers, decided he wanted his own version of the “John Wick” franchise — and this mishmash based on his 2016 movie was the best option available. The problem with this sequel, one that a good accountant like Wolff would find shameful, is that nothing adds up.
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‘The Accountant 2’
★★
Opens Friday, April 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violence, and language throughout. Running time: 125 minutes.