The Accountant 2 movie review: Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal’s brotherly energy saves ludicrous story

If you haven’t seen the 2016 movie The Accountant, don’t fret. It’s better that you haven’t. Not only was it nonsensical and lacking any emotional stakes, it was also just tedious.

The bad news is the sequel still has plenty of plot holes but the good news is, it’s a far more entertaining movie thanks to the cracking buddy not-cops dynamic between Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal as estranged brothers.

They nag and they tease but underpinning their relationship are years of resentment, disappointment and separation. It’s an engaging dynamic and easily the best part of a movie that otherwise is highly forgettable.

Affleck returns to the role of the pseudonymous Christian Wolff, an autistic man with a head for numbers, the aim of a sniper and the punch of a pro-boxer. Christian is a genius with patterns and puzzles, which makes him an excellent investigator as long as he doesn’t have to talk to people.

He used to be a money launderer and auditor for criminal enterprises and now seems to hack dating service algorithms for reasons unknown. Perhaps he’s lonely.

Then he’s contacted by Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Stevenson, reprising her role), now a deputy director of the federal financial crimes agency, with news that her former boss Raymond King (J.K. Simmons) has been murdered.

King was on a case as a PI, and Medina wants Christian’s help in looking into his killing.

The convoluted plot involves human traffickers, a nameless assassin and a compound in Juarez, as if The Accountant 2 borrowed from a script that was intended to be Sicario 3. The story is not the point, because if you think about it too much, it all falls apart.

Christian calls in his brother Braxton (Bernthal), who the previous movie established is an elite security contractor, ie. killer-for-hire, even though the two haven’t spoken for a year. There was also that little thing in the first movie where Braxton had been hired to kill Christian.

The Accountant 2 is definitely more about the parts than the sum. Aspects of it work. Obviously the aforementioned Affleck-Bernthal pair-up, which is key to why later scenes have any energy.

There’s a shoot-em-up action sequence in the climax in which Christian and Braxton’s synchronicity is almost balletic. Is it realistic that the two brothers, having barely spent any time together after childhood would still have the muscle memory of their dad’s training sessions? No, but it’s still effective because we’ve spent the past hour watching them bounce off each other.

By leaning into the brothers’ relationship and their attempts at being a genuine presence in each other’s lives, The Accountant 2 does what the original could not – it gives audiences something to care about.

The rest of the movie may still be as messy, but when Affleck and Bernthal are on screen together, you almost forget that none of the it makes that much sense.

Rating: 3/5

The Accountant 2 is in cinemas