The Accountant 2 review – tonally wild and uneven but oddly sweet

When it released in 2016, Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant was an unexpected hit for Warner Bros, making a slick $155 million return on a $44 million budget, despite a ropey critical reception. A sequel was floated as early as the following summer, but it’s taken almost a decade to materialise, with O’Connor returning alongside writer Bill Dubuque and stars Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson and JK Simmons (briefly, anyway). It’s not clear why exactly O’Connor and Affleck thought there was a need for a sequel given the fairly neat conclusion of the first film, but if there’s one thing Hollywood can’t resist, it’s turning a successful standalone film into a franchise.

So we return to the hyper violent world of autistic savant Christian Wolff, who has been travelling the USA in his Airstream since the events of the first film eight years previous, still taking on contract work for the criminal underworld. He’s called upon by Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), who has taken over from Ray King (JK Simmons) as Director of the Treasury Department’s FinCEN – Financial Crimes Enforcement Network – following his retirement. King is now working as a private investigator, bringing him into direct conflict with another high-flying assassin named Anaïs (Daniella Pineda). After King is murdered in strange circumstances, he directs Medina to ‘Find the Accountant’, which sets her on Wolff’s trail.

Wolff, meanwhile, is trying his hand at speed dating (laffs abounds!) and still searching for human connection, complicated by his autism (rather than, y’know, the fact he kills people for a living). Working with Medina brings him back into contact with his estranged little brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal), also an assassin, who is understandably pissed at Christian for failing to keep in touch with him for the past eight years. The reunion of the Wolff brothers is the best thing about The Accountant 2: Affleck and Bernthal were born to play bickering siblings, a dysfunctional double act who love each other despite the friction in their family from a childhood complicated by their absent mother and insane super soldier father. Yet the ramped-up comedic elements of the film feel tonally mismatched with its grimdark, hyper violent action-thriller elements, which see the Wolff brothers and Anaïs dispatching various goons in bloody fashion. As charming as it is seeing Affleck’s awkward assassin find a talent for line dancing or Bernthal’s abrasive Braxton discover he loves cats, there’s a real disconnect between these moments and the overarching plot, which is about, uh, human trafficking.

The film’s much-discussed portrayal of autism is also uneven. While Affleck’s low-key performance contrasts nicely from Bernthal’s more volatile one and it’s refreshing to see an autistic character in a big-budget film grappling with their emotions and experiencing moments of joy and love, The Accountant 2, like its predecessor, hems towards clichés and portraying autistic people as “weird geniuses”, a trope that was popularised with Rain Man, and the positioning of the in-universe Harbor Neuroscience institute as some sort of school for neurodivergent savants has more in common with X-Men than reality. There’s also a bizarre suggestion that Christian can somehow ‘sense’ someone he’s never met is autistic, which pushes Christian more towards superhero territory than realistic realisation of autism on screen. (Yet I must remark that as a person awaiting an autism diagnosis with two autistic siblings, the fraught relationship and constant bickering between Christian and Braxton rings true, minus the whole assassin thing.)

Ultimately the mash-up of genres doesn’t quite come together in a satisfactory manner, clashing to the point of whiplash, and attempts to incorporate Acquired Savant Syndrome into the plot feel borderline preposterous. With a third Accountant instalment in the works, O’Connor and Dubuque would do well to focus on the best part of the world they’ve constructed: the relationship between Christian and Braxton, two fucked up middle-aged brothers (whom both appear neurodivergent even if Braxton doesn’t have a diagnosis) trying to make sense of the world around them and how they relate to one another in the face of considerable childhood trauma.

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