By Jake Wilson
THE ACCOUNTANT 2
★★½
MA, 133 minutes, in cinemas
As viewers of Gavin O’Connor’s 2016 The Accountant will recall, Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) is much more than a guy who can help you with your taxes. He can perform complex mathematical calculations in an instant, his pattern recognition skills are off the charts, and he knows just how to dislocate someone’s shoulder to cause them maximum agony.
Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal in The Accountant 2.Credit: Amazon MGM Studios
The official explanation for Christian’s gifts is that he’s an autistic savant, although O’Connor and screenwriter Bill Dubuque, who have both reunited with Affleck for this second outing, have no intention of painting a realistic picture of autism or anything else.
In practice, Christian is the sort of fantasy figure we’re used to seeing in superhero movies, who struggles to fit into everyday life but can be counted on for assistance when all else fails.
Which doesn’t mean he’s straightforwardly a good guy. Not what you’d call a team player, he made his living in the first film cooking the books for criminal organisations from around the world, which still appears to be the status quo in part two.
Personally, he’s a lonesome sort, operating out of a silver mobile home like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, with no friends or even close professional associates beyond the anonymous British lady who gives him instructions over the phone, addressing him as “dreamboat”.
He does, however, have a brother: a roguish globetrotting assassin named Braxton, played by Jon Bernthal, whose role has been beefed up to compensate for the absence of Anna Kendrick, whose performance as an easily flustered fellow accountant supplied many of the first film’s comic highlights.
Where Christian is buttoned up, Braxton lets it all hang out. But despite appearances they have a lot in common, including an underlying need for human connection, which they hardly seem likely to find except with each other.
This new adventure sees them loosely on the right side of the law, helping out with a murder mystery that proves to be tied to a human trafficking ring operating on the Mexican border. It might not be everyone’s idea of a good time, but for these two it’s the ideal opportunity to reconnect and let off some steam.
Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), the “normie” agent overseeing the case, has little to do but stand by and watch them get the job done, while protesting feebly about their methods, which include kidnapping, torture and, in Christian’s case, enlisting a group of young Harvard geniuses to hack into people’s computers with zero regard for privacy laws.
Like its predecessor, The Accountant 2 is a gift hamper intended to contain something for everyone. There are a handful of brutal action sequences, there’s the somewhat convoluted and murky plot – and then there’s a surprising amount of laidback buddy-comedy stuff exploiting the rapport between the stars, including a visit to a country-and-western bar where Christian reveals a previously unsuspected gift for line-dancing.
At a pinch, this way of juxtaposing disparate elements could be seen as paralleling Christian’s more significant gift for fitting images and ideas together in unusual ways. It can also be traced back to the classic westerns and adventure films of Howard Hawks, where the characters are often as tender with each other as they are ruthless in taking down the semi-anonymous villains.
For that matter a good many Hawks characters, including those played by John Wayne, can be stiff and awkward in ways not so far from Christian – which only confirms it’s wiser to accept The Accountant as a genre fantasy than to think it has anything to say about real-life autism, as opposed to the larger riddle of how antisocial tendencies can co-exist with empathy.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.