The Accountant 2

dir: Gavin O’Connor

2025

Who in the name of fuck asked for a sequel to The Accountant? Other than Ben Affleck, or Ben Affleck's accountant, can you imagine anyone writing letters to their local MP or kids in comment sections begging for another movie where Ben Affleck plays an autistic chartered accountant who also happens to have access to limitless funds and no shortage of weaponry?

Wait, that just sounds like another Batman sequel.

When I say that such a sequel is unlikely, when it clearly exists, it’s because the first movie, if you went into it blind, was a hilarious example of escalation into insane realms: it was the equivalent of finding out that the guy making your sandwich at the local deli is not only ex-SAS, but they’re undercover, and they can kill 50 trained killers with only their butter knife, but not only that, but they own all the butter knives in the world, and run all the Subway franchises, plus they have weapons everywhere, and they somehow can kill anyone they want to because they’re neuro-divergent?

The fact that the entirety of the characterisation they give for this character is that he’s autistic, and that it justifies two feature length action films where he gets to kill hundreds of people is perhaps an unintended slight against an entire community of people who never asked for such slander, but also it raises the bar to a completely unrealistic level of expectation. It was bad enough back in the day when Rain Man established an unearned and unrealistic expectation that severely autistic people make up for their lack of social graces and ability to communicate by being able to count cards in Las Vegas; these contemporary flicks posit that autistic people make for great killers, hackers and super criminals just because they’re on the spectrum.

It’s nuts. I have co-workers, and know people in my personal life who are neuro-divergent, and I have to say, I’ve nary seen one of them hack a single computer or shoot a single well aimed sniper shot at anyone, ever. One of them at my work can barely figure out why his phone makes these beeping sounds when he gets notifications. After watching both of these deeply misguided movies I asked a different neuro-divergent co-worker about whether they’d ever been brilliant at shooting mercenaries or laundering mafia money and she said she didn’t get the Maths and Science autism – hers is of the Trains and Politics kind, which means she knows who all the prime ministers have been and the names of all the trains, which I thought was only on Thomas the Tank Engine thing, but then I’m ignorant of a lot of things, so there.

This is one of the many times where someone in the film industry does something that they think is a net positive – showing that neuro-diverse people can do so much more than just solve Rubik’s cubes really fast or tell you all the numbers in Pi up to thousands of places accurately, but they take it so far that it makes it seem ludicrous that they would even try.

One also feels compelled to add that, for all the alleged progressivism of their intentions, they’re still not employing an autistic person in this key role of the autistic lead, which limits how seriously I can take their ideas regarding representation.

I don’t want to seem unsympathetic or unsupportive to the neuro-divergent community when I say this, because everything I intend to say in this review should be read as a criticism of Affleck both as an actor and as the driving force behind the flick getting made, but they are terrible advocates for their cause. His portrayal of this character is comical, comically farcical in a flick that I don’t think is intended as a comedy.

You could almost, if you’re slightly deranged like I am through illness or maybe substance abuse, make the case that the first one was sort of a dark comedy, in that all these serious people and character actors like J.K Simmons, Anna Kendrick, John Lithgow stand around talking very seriously about Ben Affleck’s character whenever he’s not on screen. “The Accountant did what? Who is the Accountant? What’s The Accountant wearing, do you think? Does The Accountant think this skirt makes my arse look too big?”

And all of The Accountant’s dialogue is the blunt, declarative, undiplomatic, uncharitable kind of “zingers” that people expect from Sheldon of Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon fame, who is television’s version of this character, without the massive wealth and military training.

Except in this one, unless I’m misremembering, Affleck adds this weird almost petulant child way of talking in some scenes which sounded more like Milton from Office Space complaining about someone taking his stapler or taking away his cubicle wall.

He still has the cold, affectless way of telling people whatever nonsense is on his mind which is invariably insulting. The almost opening scene re-introducing the character (which is not the opening scene, seeing as that one kills off one of the main characters from the previous film, and introduces a bunch of goons and an antagonist) of Christian Wolff at a speed dating Romance! get-together, which is levels of baffling that I can barely grasp. It’s funny in the sense that it shows how ill-equipped The Accountant is at talking to women, and how horrified those women are when they talk to him for more than a few minutes, but then there’s this other level where he’s talking to the organisers who are trying to figure out why he’s even there.

He repeatedly tells them that he gamed their algorithm after studying the ways that their system makes matches based on the amount and whiteness of the teeth in a person’s smile or some similar bullshit. Yes, okay, but to what end, Christian? For the sake of it, or because you’re lonely and you think you should have someone to inflict your bullshit upon?

The hungry smiles of the women who approach his table fade almost instantly when he begins talking, because they find something instantly to be offended by or bored by when he talks. In other words he’s smart enough to manipulate a dating site algorithm, but not smart enough to make small talk with women. Curse this genius level intellect of mine!!!

Back to the basement with you, The Accountant. Someone gets murderised, but before that moment scrawls “find The Accountant” on his arm, so an official looking person (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) who’s from The Government tries to find The Accountant because… she was told to do so. When she eventually makes contact with him through the School for Gifted Neuro-Diverse children that he’s set up, one of the first things he says to her is that she is only in the role she’s in within The Government because he, The Accountant, put her there.

This makes her feel insecure, like she didn’t earn her position despite presumably being good at her job (and being in the first film and having survived). She is, despite having sought out The Accountant, exasperated with him throughout, especially once he begins torturing people, kidnapping others and eventually starts slaughtering people by the bushel. I mean, if you’re going to call in The Accountant, you can’t be surprised when he starts auditing people with extreme prejudice. And of course it’s that he’s neuro-divergent, not that he’s acting like an amoral sociopath. Oh no, the differences are vast, vast I tell you. No way you could confuse the two.

But he’s not doing it because he likes torturing people – it’s because he’s trying to get to The Truth about what happened to a family in a photo, you see. In his objective to help all these neuro-typical people in general, he gleans that one person in the photo is like him, like his people, and this is his personal motivation to help out as many of the people in the photo who are still alive as he can.

Erm, right? I think that’s it. If it isn’t exactly that, all you have to know is this flick escalates so that it’s not just about a missing family, but then people smuggling, sex trafficking, imprisoning kids to keep their parents compliant, and something something contract killers, and a blonde woman that keeps wandering around killing people with a great degree of skill.

But even that is not what the film is really about. It’s really a buddy odd couple comedy, because Christian / Accountant calls in his brother Braxton (the great Jon Bernthal) to help him kill even more peoples.

As if he needed help anyway. We watched a whole film where he killed a whole bunch of people with even less emotion that John Wick (and less of a motivation) and no help; he only wants his brother around, who he hasn’t seen since the last film ended, being eight years since the first flick came out, because he’s lonely. All those hundreds of silvery caravans, and no-one to share them with.

Awww. As an odd couple, they are not funny, and definitely less than the sum of their parts. But Jon Bernthal is just so energetic, and so much of a bellowing bully, that he forces energy into the film where it scarcely deserves to be. There’s a significant portion of the movie where he doesn’t stop yelling his dialogue at the top of his lungs, and I almost hesitate to say that the flick is the better for it, because that sounds like I’m rewarding bad behaviour.

I probably said half of that because I really like Jon Bernthal, and that’s not because he plays an amoral sociopath in Daredevil and his own Punisher series, but because as good as he is playing murderous maniacs, he actually can do the other non-maniac acting things, like when he played Shane in The Walking Dead, or a tonne of other roles. One of my favourites of his was when he played an engaged and engaging high school teacher in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which few reviewers liked but I was completely on board with. Seeing him pop up in stuff is a delight.

This is not a great use of his talents, but eh, what are you going to do. This flick, whatever its pretentions, is dumb action fodder done relatively well. The absurdity of the premise and the absurdity of the main character doesn’t detract at all from the on screen shenanigans. I can and do watch movies where dull stoics like Jason Statham or Keanu or anyone else march stolidly through a flick killing multitudes of the faceless: Why wouldn’t I want to watch two people do the same thing instead?

I think that what I’m ultimately saying is that this is a deeply flawed movie with a bonkers premise but it wasn’t completely unenjoyable, even as the seeming point of the flick (finding out who the woman in the photo is / the blonde woman is and why she is killing all these people) doesn’t seem to matter in the end, and is reduced to, for the climax, a criminal cartel deciding to kill a bunch of kids because, eh, what are you going to do, with Christian and Braxton (and the school of gifted autistic kids) as the only people who can stop them.

It’s laughable that it exists, but I like to laugh, like God apparently does whenever we make plans.

6 times this Accountant didn’t really find any additional deductions for him but he did kill that guy who once cut me off in traffic out of 10

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“Chris, please explain to the normie: we need to finish what we've started.” – a-ha! Now the neurotypical are the ones being oppressed! – The Accountant 2