‘The Accountant 2’ Review: More Laughs, Less Number-Crunching

Gavin O’Connor’s 2016 film The Accountant is by and large memorable for the pairing of Ben Affleck’s autistic accountant-slash-assassin Christian Wolff and Anna Kendrick’s exuberant number cruncher Dana. Their rapport is charming, with Christian’s innate bluntness amusingly clashing with Dana’s anxious people-pleasing instincts. Their bonding over mathematics initiates enough of a spark to set Dana up as a potential love interest for Christian, which makes it a pity that the character is eventually sidelined, unable to compete with two wildly convoluted storylines focusing on Christian’s derring-do.

One gets the sense that in the intervening years, O’Connor and writer Bill Dubuque noticed a potential missed opportunity, and so The Accountant 2 leans into mining humor from its central pairing, and to the point that it ends up being as much a buddy comedy as an action film. Here, Christian teams up with his brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal), whom he hasn’t seen in over eight years, and while the two make for an at times funny and touching odd couple, the depiction of their relationship is marred by a corny and borderline offensive portrayal of autism.

Braxton is as brutally efficient an assassin as Christian, but Bernthal brings an ecstatic vitality to his action sequences that’s missing in Christian’s bouts of ass-kicking. And Bernthal is equally convincing as the wounded brother who’s spent his life longing to see the signs of love, affirmation, and approval that Christian is simply not equipped to provide him with.

In a scene where the brothers sit atop Christian’s motorhome, Braxton opens up to his brother by wondering if the reason Christian never reaches out or says he misses his brother is because of his condition or because of Braxton himself. Bernthal brings a touching vulnerability to the scene that’s even further accentuated when Christian responds in an emotionally distant manner, not quite giving his brother a clear answer one way or the other.

Bernthal’s reactions to Christian line-dancing and trying to connect with a woman (Dominique Domingo) who hits on him, are both sweet and funny, and his comic timing is impeccable. Significantly shakier is Affleck, who plays Christian straight in the more dramatic sequences while, unlike in the first film, playing up the comedy in scenes that ultimately use the character’s autistic traits as a punchline. An early sequence involving a speed dating event is particularly egregious in this respect, and there are moments throughout where Christian feels more like Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond from Rain Man rather than the character from The Accountant.

The uneasiness of some of The Accountant 2’s comic strokes is further exacerbated by the context of the investigation that Christian and Braxton are conducting with the help of Treasury Department agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), who, after hunting Christian in the first film, has now formed an uneasy alliance with him. The trio is plunged into a conspiracy that, for linking a pizza factory to a vast human trafficking network, feels bizarrely inspired by the Pizzagate conspiracy. And that’s before their globetrotting surfaces a distractingly strange subplot about a young assassin, Anaïs (Daniella Pineda), suffering from amnesia.

The depiction of the ins and out of this investigation isn’t only boilerplate, like it was lifted straight from a network TV procedural, but the bleakness of the subject matter, and the understandably serious tone of scenes surrounding it, brushes awkwardly against the far more lighthearted tone of the rest of the film. As The Accountant 2 drags out to over two hours, and its two storylines remain tonally at war with one another, it becomes increasingly clear that, two films in, this series still hasn’t figured out exactly what it wants to be.