The Accountant 2 Is a Shaggy, Silly Bro-Hangout Movie

More murder, less math, in Ben Affleck's odd but amiable sequel.

The Accountant was a conceptually odd movie: On the one hand, it was a wonky corporate thriller about a neurodivergent savant digging through receipts to uncover crimes and conspiracies. On the other hand, it was a shoot-'em-up about a remorseless killer with nearly superhuman abilities, who finishes the movie by gunning down an army of well-armed thugs.

The odd thing about the movie is that the killer and the neurodivergent savant are the same guy—as if being autistic not only made him brilliant at math, but murder. Even odder still, they were both played by Ben Affleck. 

This was not the sort of movie that demands a sequel. Who, after nearly a decade, was demanding more accounting, or more remorseless killing? Well, apparently Ben Affleck, who returns as star and producer for The Accountant 2. 

This time, if anything, the twin prongs of the premise sit even more uneasily together. The follow-up features even more punching and shooting, largely at the expense of the movie's titular professional responsibilities. Yes, there are a few scenes that rely on math-wizardry and nearly superhuman pattern recognition. But Affleck's accountant character, Christian Wolff, is less a spreadsheet savant with useful weapons training and more of an autistic John Wick who occasionally does some accounting, er, too. 

The film is elevated by the presence of Jon Bernthal, who appeared at the end of the first film as Wolff's brother Braxton—and who, conveniently, also happens to be a nearly superhuman gunslinger. In the sequel, he takes time off from his work as a high-end killer for hire to join Wolff and Treasury agent Marybeth Medina, who are trying to piece together the mystery of who killed their mutual friend, financial crimes investigator Raymond King (J.K. Simmons, briefly reprising his role from the first film). Inevitably, this results in a wall of photos and strings suggesting strange connections—and a convoluted plot that resembles the same. 

Turns out there's a vast human smuggling operation working out of Los Angeles, and the people running it are bad news. The movie's immigration politics are more gestured at than spelled out, but it's at least a little bit unexpected to see a film revolve around the travails of a Salvadoran immigrant family given today's headlines. And if nothing else, the film, without ever saying it outright, demonstrates the ways in which immigration restrictions, like drug prohibition, can empower cartels and other barbarous criminals by making the act of crossing the border to work illegal. 

But the movie's immigration plot is mostly a pretext to give Affleck and Bernthal a sufficiently large pool of bad guys to take down. The movie's best moments are the hangout scenes between the two brothers, as they drink beer, reminisce about their father, and talk about their feelings—or get into bar fights, to avoid talking about their feelings. 

Bernthal plays Braxton as a sort of volatile, emotionally stunted, but fundamentally appealing character, which helps smooth over the fact that he's an unrepentant mass murderer who works for an international criminal operation. Most of these bros-being-bros scenes could have been cut from the film without undermining the plot, but they give this otherwise mediocre thriller a shaggy likability, making the ludicrous narrative easier to accept. 

Indeed, the story is often patently absurd. Among other things, it involves a woodsy mansion that's home to a whole gaggle of pattern-recognizing child savants who can sort through information and hack devices with the sort of ease, speed, and sophistication that would make the National Security Agency blush. The chain of clues and revelations that Affleck and Bernthal follow requires any number of conveniences and plot holes, even beyond the brainiac super kids and the accountant who murders henchmen with Olympic-level gymnastic abilities. 

It's an inessential movie, but the rapport between Affleck and Bernthal makes it amusing enough to be worth watching—just so long as you never feel too inclined to dig into the ludicrous details and call them into account.