What if Rain Man was Batman? Sounds like the pitch for a comedy sketch that would have absolutely slayed in the summer of 1989. So it’s worth remembering that The Accountant, the 2016 action thriller that ran with that premise, was merely a preposterous crock and not some outdated outrage. What kept the film from teetering out of silliness into offensiveness was, unexpectedly, Ben Affleck’s performance as Christian Wolff, an autistic bookkeeper with a calculator for a brain and a downright mathematical proficiency with his fists and a rifle. The star was definitely miscast in the role; it’s much easier to imagine his buddy Matt Damon playing a character who’s basically Jason Bourne by way of Will Hunting. But Affleck approached the assignment with restraint. No fussy affectations, just a deliberate tamping down of his more charismatic qualities. He mostly skirted caricature, which is more than anyone had reason to expect from a Hollywood potboiler about a supersoldier on the spectrum.
The Accountant 2, arriving this week some eight long years after the original, does not earn even that faintest of praise. Affleck is back as Christian, a.ka. the mythic accountant of the title, a numbers guy who doesn’t look like he needs to know numbers. But having previously downplayed the character’s idiosyncrasies, like the way he blows on his fingers before a meal, the star now heightens them for comic effect. He even sounds different: The pinched diction the actor tried out in part one here overwhelms his performance, until you’d swear you were watching Stephen Root in Office Space, stammering away about his stolen stapler. He’s doing shtick, mugging for laughs. And that’s in keeping with a sequel that doubles down on the broadest, most exaggerated elements of its predecessor, until you’ve forgotten what worked even a little about that sleeper hit.
Was the plotting of the original as convoluted? There are fewer flashbacks in The Accountant 2, because we’ve already been regaled with the origin story of a special boy trained to be an unstoppable man. But the conspiracy comes thicker, tying together a dangerous cartel, missing persons, and a mysterious assassin (Daniella Pineda) on a crusade of vengeance. To solve the murder of Treasury Department honcho Raymond King (J.K. Simmons, getting out while the getting is good) our fabled, antisocial hero forges an uneasy allegiance of convenience with the dead man’s protégé, Marybeth (Cynthia Addai-Robinson). Marybeth spent most of the last movie dramatically uncovering information on screens, so it counts as a promotion that she’s now in the field, shaking her head in disgust as Christian casually breaks laws and limbs in her company. Nothing about him is quite as implausible as the premise that a federal agent might actually disapprove of torturing, kidnapping, and spying on American citizens.
Not content with just one buddy-cop-like relationship, The Accountant 2 also rekindles the bromance between Christian and his younger brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal), a ruthless assassin who’s really just a lonely guy, honest! Whenever the two are together, as during a heart-to-heart in a Los Angeles trailer park, you can tell that this is the movie director Gavin O’Connor wanted to make — a tale of brotherly love cut from the same cloth as his soulful macho weepie, Warrior. Their scenes are also a play on the testy dynamic of, yes, Rain Man, and O’Connor seems much more interested in them than he does in the action, like the cleanly staged but obligatory gunfights of the beginning and end.
Bernthal is such a hoot, in his cowboy way, that you can almost overlook that he’s playing a glib punchline: the cuddly psychopath who just needs a hug. (He’s introduced talking the ear off a young French woman who’s terrified that he’ll hurt her. Hilarious.) There’s something seriously off about the emotional calculus of these films. They want us to get all mushy about a couple of unrepentant killers because one of them likes animals and the other has a developmental disorder. The first Accountant at least had Anna Kendrick as a kind of audience surrogate, unsure whether to regard Affleck’s Einsteinian badass with awe, fear, or desire. The sequel could use a lot more of her ambivalence towards the character.
Everything goofy and unconvincing about The Accountant is compounded here. (Maybe that’s why the title, as it appears on screen, is actually The Accountant squared. Or maybe that just seemed… mathier.) We get more of Christian’s handler, this time running a junior-Bourne surveillance team of preteen, autistic computer whizzes. How this is different than our heroes being tragically militarized as boys is unclear, but the movie seems to regard their after-school program of illegal surveillance as a good thing. While the original film certainly struggled to juggle its various genre interests (it was a better romantic comedy than a corporate espionage movie or action flick), the tonal whiplash of the sequel is a lot: While the boys bicker like sitcom siblings, the film darkens with subplots about sex trafficking, disappeared immigrants, and (for unhappily accidental topicality) a prison in El Salvador. Meanwhile, the supposedly rousing action finale hinges on whether the bad guys will kill a busload of kids and drop them into a mass grave. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
To enjoy The Accountant 2, you have to buy into Christian Wolff. He’s a badass savant, the smartest man in every room, a Sherlock Holmes of math. At one point in the movie, he picks up line-dancing just by watching everyone’s feet — and then picks up the girl, too. Is there anything he can’t do, except maybe maintain eye contact? The fantasy, a timely rebuke to the despicable contempt of RFK Jr., is that neurodivergence makes you into a superhero. But Affleck doesn’t sell it this time. He’s too busy going for the easy laugh. And so the supposed fun of the movie just doesn’t add up, like a long equation with a missing number.
From Rolling Stone US
