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.

Review: 'The Legend of Ochi' brings a modern fantasy tale to vivid life, with puppetry and Helena Zengel's luminous performance

Folklore and fantasy intertwine beautifully in “The Legend of Ochi,” an eccentric and wonder-filled children’s adventure that grown-ups may come to appreciate even more than their kids.

Writer-director Isaiah Saxton, making a sure-footed feature debut, starts on a remote island in Carpathia, where teen girl Yuri (Helena Zengel) has grown up in a house full of boys – all trainees in the hunting squad maintained by her father, Maxim (Willem Dafoe). Maxim trains the boys to hunt down the elusive and fear-inducing creatures called Ochi, which live in hiding on the island.

One day, Yuri discovers that a baby Ochi has hidden in her knapsack and come home with her. In her bedroom, Yuri soon discovers that Ochi aren’t the terrifying creatures Maxim has taught her they are. So she decides to strike out on her own, to return the baby Ochi to its tribe. To do that, she needs help — from her estranged mom, Dasha (Emily Watson), who lives in a cabin far up into the mountains.

Meanwhile, Maxim, thinking that the Ochi have kidnapped Yuri, assembles his young hunters into a search party — with his most trusted protege, Petro (Finn Wolfhard), leading the way. What Maxim doesn’t realize is that Petro might be harboring a crush on Yuri.

Saxton spins the events in Ochi like a fairy tale, sometimes following the dream logic of folktale. He also tosses Yuri, and us, into the fray and lets us figure out the complex backstory of the Ochi as we go. Saxton undoubtedly wrote Tolkien-sized amounts of lore to make the Ochi story complete, but he’s smart enough not to show all of his homework.

Most spectacularly, Saxton deploys some master puppeteers to make the Ochi look realistic, both in their expressions and movement. Making these creatures interact with Zengel (who’s grown more talented since her breakout role opposite Tom Hanks in “News of the World”) is like witnessing magic in real time.

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‘The Legend of Ochi’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for violent content, a bloody image, smoking, thematic elements and some language. Running time: 96 minutes.

Review: 'The Shrouds' shows director David Cronenberg taking his body-horror game into some darkly humorous areas

There’s cool and there’s cold, and the always-cool director David Cronenberg veers too far into iceberg territory in his latest body-horror exploration of self-torturing humanity, “The Shrouds.”

Karsh, played by Vincent Cassel, is an inventor whose most recent creation was inspired by his grief at losing his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), to a brutal illness. The invention, called a “shroud,” is wrapped around a corpse at burial, and provides loved ones a real-time 3-D video image of the deceased as they decompose in the ground. Cronenberg, who wrote and directed, creates some early dark comedy by having Karsh explain all this to a blind date (Jennifer Dale) in a restaurant that’s attached to the cemetery where Becca is laid to rest.

Karsh’s obsession with Becca’s slowly rotting body, and the technology he’s created to witness that process, is starting to wear on his brain and soul. He takes on an enigmatic client, Karoly Szabo (Vieslav Krystyan), who he sees only through video messages — getting his orders from Karoly’s beautiful wife, Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt). Karsh also deals with the growing paranoia of his engineer, Maury (Guy Pearce), and his latent feelings for Maury’s ex-wife, Terry, who’s also Becca’s sister (and also played by Kruger).

Cronenberg’s eye for luxurious detail is unparalleled, and he uses it here to surround Karsh with a well-appointed house that isolates him further from humanity. That isolation takes its toll, as Karsh has trouble distinguishing between dreams and memories, particularly as he recalls the progression of Becca’s eventually fatal illness.

Cronenberg’s penchant for pushing body horror from the disturbing to the surreal is still strong — though he seems to understand that Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” has hit the outer barrier of gross-out gore, so Cronenberg has to find a new direction to make his statement. The path he’s chosen in “The Shrouds” and “Crimes of the Future” before it, of detached dark humor, is promising but doesn’t deliver enough here.

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‘The Shrouds’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 25, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language and some violent content. Running time: 120 minutes.

Review: 'Sinners' seamlessly blends Jim Crow cruelty with vampire fantasy, and serves up a double dose of Michael B. Jordan

If you’re going to use your movie to launch a fresh new vampire mythology, you’d better be smart about it — and writer-director Ryan Coogler is very smart about how he creates the lore in “Sinners,” and very cool in how he builds the characters who have to deal with it.

We’re in Mississippi in 1932, and we see a young Black man, Sammie (played by newcomer Miles Caton), entering the church where his father (Saul Williams) is the preacher. Sammie is scarred, clutching the neck of a broken guitar so tightly the strings are digging into his fingers. His father acts as if he knows his son has seen the devil. The movie then goes back one day, and we learn how right Sammie’s father is.

Here’s where we meet twin brothers, known as Smoke and Stack, returned home to Mississippi after some time making their fortunes up north in Chicago. The twins — both played by Michael B. Jordan, who’s appeared in all of Coogler’s movies (“Fruitvale Station,” “Creed” and the “Black Panther” films) — have a dream to open a juke joint, and they have the cash and a truckload of bootleg liquor to make it happen.

There are questions about where the twins got that loot, and who might be coming south to retrieve it. The movie also gives us some backstory about Stack’s tempestuous relationship with Mary (Hailie Steinfeld), a white woman, and Smoke’s past romance with Miss Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), who knows a thing or two about evil spirits and such.

Stack recognizes Sammie’s guitar skills and immediately signs him to perform at the juke joint on opening night. Stack also cajoles an ancient bluesman, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), to play piano. It’s Annie who recognizes that Sammie is that rare talent who, according to the legends of several cultures, can cross into past and future — and, if he’s not careful, draw out demons. 

That’s where the vampires come in, though Coogler is patient enough to make them wait for their entrance, so we can let these characters fully inhabit this dark and dangerous place. In a place where the Klan hides in plain sight, vampires have to step up their game to be the most evil creatures around. If you go to “Sinners” because you saw vampires in the trailer, be patient and you will get what you came to see

One thing “Sinners” delivers is Jordan, clearly enjoying the double role as Smoke and Stack — one carefree and smiling, the other brooding and quick to violence, and both fascinating separately and together. Coogler also has a fun time showing off in the moments when the two Jordans share the screen, and sometimes a cigarette.

The other crucial element here is the music, which binds the story’s Jim Crow reality and vampire fantasy, and allows for a stunning cameo in the final scene. (Don’t leave when the credits start, or you’ll miss most of it.) 

There’s an astonishing scene midway through the movie, where young Sammie is wailing on the guitar and causing the time streams to come together — until the Mississippi locals are sharing the dance floor with west African drummers and modern breakdancers, a dose of magical realism that elevates “Sinners” into something as thought-provoking as it is entertaining.

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‘Sinners’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, sexual content and language. Running time: 137 minutes.

Review: 'The Wedding Banquet' is a sparkling remake that builds on the 1993 original with a strong acting ensemble

Director Andrew Ahn does something slightly miraculous in “The Wedding Banquet,” by updating And Lee’s now-classic 1993 gay rom-com for our current moment while maintaining and even deepening its romantic spirit.

The original centered on a Chinese landlord in New York who agrees to marry a woman living in his apartment building so he can get a green card — because he’s not legally able to marry his American boyfriend. The situation spirals out of control when the man’s parents fly in to arrange a ridiculously elaborate wedding reception.

In this sprightly remake, a few details have changed. Min (Han Gi-Chan) is a Korean artist living in Seattle with his commitment-averse boyfriend, Chris (“Saturday Night Live’s” Bowen Yang). Min comes from money, but he is strenuously avoiding taking a job in his family’s conglomerate.

Min and Chris rent out the guest house of their friends, Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), whose friendship goes back to when Chris and Angela, still confused about their sexual identity, hooked up during freshman orientation in college. Lee and Angela want a baby, but Lee has just gone through a second unsuccessful round of IVF and they can’t afford a third one.

When Min’s grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung, the Oscar winner from “Minari”) warns Min that his student visa is going to run out, and that she wants him to return to Korea and work for their company, Min hits the panic button. Marrying Chris is not an option, because Min’s grandfather is homophobic and because Chris has already said not to Min’s past proposals. So Min he drops to one knee and asks Angela, offering to pay for Lee’s next round of IVF of treatments if Angela will go through with a green-card wedding. 

Among those who are shocked by this is Angela’s mom (Joan Chen), who has turned being an LGBTQ+ ally into a competitive sport.

The script — for which Ahn shares credit with James Schamus, who co-wrote Ang Lee’s 1993 version — finds room for screwball comedy, like when Min’s grandmother arrives unannounced in Seattle, and Lee, Angela and Chris have to scramble to “de-queer” the house. (There's also a “Star Wars” joke that Tran, an alumna of that franchise, must have had fun being a part of.) But Ahn, who has made such lovely slice-of-life dramas as “Spa Night” and “Driveways,” provides his actors with characters who are richly realized and more complete than those in a standard rom-com.

All of the main leads get their moments to shine — with special mention to Youn’s touching speech to Min near the end, Gladstone and Tran’s lovely interplay, and Yang’s ability to stretch beyond his well-established comic gifts to find some pathos in Chris’ indecision. Ahn has gathered a strong ensemble, each actor building on one another to create a delightful movie. 

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‘The Wedding Banquet’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 18, in area theaters. Rated R for language and some sexual material/nudity. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: 'The Ugly Stepsister" is a fractured fairy tale that shows the fear guiding Cinderella's antagonist toward disaster

Spare a thought for the plight of the fairy tale stepsister — who, as depicted in writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt’s subversively grotesque “The Ugly Stepsister,” is under a lot of pressure and hits the breaking point.

In this disturbing mix of medieval misogyny and body horror from Norway, we are introduced to Elvira (Lea Myren), a teen girl who has a crush on her kingdom’s prince, Julian (Isac Calmroth), whom she knows only from his published book of love poems. Elvira’s image of Julian is of a perfect boyfriend, tender and loving, ready to sweep up a fair maiden in his arms, even if she’s got braces on her teeth, as Elvira does.

Elvira’s mother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), marries Otto (Ralph Carlsson), thinking he’s got enough money to solve the family’s financial problems. Elvira figures out Otto is broke, but unfortunately that’s just after Otto has keeled over dead at dinner. Rebekka reluctantly takes Otto’s beautiful daughter, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), under their roof, but soon the stepmother is treating Agnes like a servant — and given her an unflattering nickname: Cinderella.

Word spreads from the castle that Julian is inviting all young virgins to a ball, where he will choose among them to be his bride. Through the kingdom, the competition becomes fierce to find ways to impress Julian, which is why Rebekka has rushed Elvira to the Shrek-universe version of a plastic surgeon (Adam Lundgren), to remove her braces and take a chisel to her slightly imperfect nose.

Elvira and Agnes are enrolled in a finishing school to learn the social graces, like dancing ballet — presented here as a way to display one’s femininity. Rebekka bribes the school’s headmistress, Miss Sophia (Cecelia Forss), to help Elvira get through, and it’s Sophia who gives Elvira a secret weapon to lose weight: A tapeworm egg.

Blichfeldt imagines the rivalry between Cinderella and her stepsister not as a head-to-head competition for the charming prince, as the common fairy tale narrative tells us. Here, the conflict is a forced competition of survival, set up by the scheming Rebekka and by a society that will only tolerate one kind of princess — blonde, thin, demure and unrealistically beautiful. Elvira is obsessed with landing Julian, but it’s an obsession build on fear of rejection of both the kingdom’s noblemen but also the rejection from her own mother.

The body horror elements build slowly, but do escalate fairly quickly. The gory effects don’t reach the bloody excess of, say, “The Substance,” but there are moments when the audience is likely to wince at something Elvira has done to maintain her beauty secrets. Those scenes punctuate the brutal unfairness foisted on these characters, an ocean and a couple centuries away from us — but as real and as sympathetic as your neighbor.

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‘The Ugly Stepsister’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), and soon streaming on Shudder. Not rated, but probably R for violence, gore, some sexuality and language. Running time: 110 minutes; in Norwegian, with subtitles.

Review: 'Drop' keeps the thrills going in a confined space, thanks to a sharp script and Meghann Fahy's emotion-packed performance

The thriller “Drop” is a fast-paced nail-biter that shows again that Christopher Landon — the guy who directed “Happy Death Day” and “Freaky” — is the master of movies whose basic premise can be written on a cocktail napkin.

Meet Violet (Meghann Fahy) a widow, whose late husband, Blake (Michael Shea, seen in flashbacks) was physically and emotionally abusive. Now she’s a therapist, specializing in helping women who were abused like her. On this night, four years after her husband’s death — the details of which will become important later — she’s going out for a date for the first time, with Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a photographer who works for the mayor. Violet’s sister, Jen (Violett Beane), is babysitting Violet’s 5-year-old son, Toby (Jacob Robinson). 

The date seems to be going well, because Henry is charming and puts Violet at ease. If only her phone would stop buzzing with unsolicited drops. They’re annoying at first, but get threatening — with the unseen person on the other end displaying video from Violet’s home security system, and the masked gunman already in her kitchen. The texts tell her what she must do to keep the gunman from killing Toby: She must kill her date.

The bulk of the movie, written by Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach, follows Violet as she tries to stall for time as she sizes up the people in the rooftop restaurant to figure out who might be sending the texts. Among the possible suspects: The improv-comic waiter (Jeffery Self), the leering piano player (Ed Weeks), the sympathetic bartender (Gabrielle Ryan), the older man (Reed Diamond) there on a blind date, the tech bro (Travis Nelson) who’s suspiciously alone, or the table of teens going to the prom. 

None of this works without Fahy, familiar to fans of “The White Lotus’” second season or the pre-pandemic Freeform series “The Bold Type.” Here, Fahy gets to run through a lot of emotions — fear and sadness when her husband is abusing her, guilt and resolve as she rebuilds her life and her therapist practice, and glimmers of hope when she meets Henry, and anger and steely determination as she works to escape the threats of her telephone tormenter.

Landon embraces the inherent tension of creating a thriller all set in the confined space of the restaurant, where Violet can see everyone else and vice versa. Superimposing the words of the texts on the walls around Violet just adds to the claustrophobia. Unfortunately, Landon can’t sustain that constricted feeling for the whole run, and the action kind of goes off the rails outside the restaurant. By then, the audience is committed enough to “Drop,” and invested in seeing Violet get out of this mess, that we’re forgiving of a disjointed conclusion.

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‘Drop’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong violent content, suicide, some strong language and sexual references. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'Warfare' puts its cast and the viewer in the middle of battle, in a harrowing depiction of combat during the Iraq War

I’ve never served in the military or seen combat close-up, so I can’t say definitively that writer-directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland put viewers in the middle of the fray in their movie “Warfare” — but they create moments of chaos, blood and pain that are as close as I or any other civilian likely will want to be to the fight.

Mendoza served in a Navy SEAL sniper unit during the Iraq War, and the story told here is based on his memory of that time in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006. There’s a character named Ray, played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (from “Reservation Dogs”), who is providing what appears to be Mendoza’s P.O.V. He’s usually the one on the radio, reporting the situation to superiors back at base and relaying orders from above.

The mission seems simple: Commandeer a house and set up a sniper post that has eyes and rifles trained on an open-air marketplace nearby. Of course, in combat, nothing is simple — and the unit must move the Iraqi families living in the house into a back room while they set up their observation area.

Then there’s gunfire and one word yelled into the sniper’s space: “Grenade!”

In that moment, one sniper is wounded sufficiently that an armored personnel carrier, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, is called in to take the injured man to safety. But when the Bradley gets there, an IED is set off. More damage, more injuries, more carnage and more chaos.

Garland, who last directed “Civil War,” brings the technical firepower to make the fake carnage look and feel as real as he can. Mendoza, who was Garland’s military consultant on “Civil War,” is here to provide his on-the-ground recollection of what that should look and feel like.

The viewer may recognize some of the actors playing SEALs and other military men here, like Will Poulter (“Death of a Unicorn”), Joseph Quinn (“A Quiet Place: Day One”), Charles Melton (“May/December”) or Michael Gandolfini (“The Many Saints of New Jersey”). Others will be less familiar. 

Mendoza and Garland (who directed “Civil War,” for which Mendoza was a military consultant) don’t provide backstories for these guys, and if you catch someone’s name, largely It’s incidental. In the dust and sweat and blood, it becomes difficult to tell them apart — and that’s the point.

This isn’t a war movie of your grandparents’ generation, where you knew there would be one farm boy, one guy from Brooklyn, and so on. “Warfare” is about how the camaraderie of the unit — depicted in the first scene, when the men are whooping and hollering at women in leotards in an ‘80s dance-aerobics video — makes these individuals a fighting force, with one shared purpose. That purpose is to do everything to make sure everyone who went out on this mission comes back alive. 

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‘Warfare’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for intense war violence and bloody/grisly images, and language throughout. Running time: 95 minutes.