The Accountant 2 review - belated return of Ben Affleck's lethal bean-counter

It’s been nine years since Ben Affleck’s original portrayal of Christian Wolff in The Accountant, who’s not only an accountant but also a super-efficient assassin working for the highest bidders.

However, this time around, a little more black humour has leaked into the drama. There’s a delightfully tongue-in-cheek early sequence where Wolff attends the Boise Romance Festival, a kind of pile-on dating game which is apparently an irresistible magnet for desperate single women. In his smart blue suit, Christian proves very popular. But his heart, if he has one, is elsewhere. He explains how he created his own dating app after calculating how to manipulate dating-related terminology, and considers it inevitable that it worked as predicted. He delivers this as drily as if he were reading out an Amazon driver’s delivery schedule.

But Christian’s permafrosted intellect aside, Accountant 2 also deals with some deeper, darker themes. Central to the drama, beside the brutal assassination of a government agent, is a people-smuggling operation that imports women and children from South America to the USA, as fodder for prostitution and child slavery rackets. The identity of one particular family from El Salvador which had been uncovered by Treasury bigwig Ray King (JK Simmons, pictured above with Daniella Pineda) ticks away remorselessly beneath the narrative, as Christian is teamed with Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) from the Treasury’s financial crimes unit FinCEN to try to track down the family’s surviving daughter.

The family back-story of Christian and his brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal), who were drilled and bullied by their militaristic father virtually to the point of psychosis, was explored in the original film, but the bond between the brothers is revisited and thrust into the foreground. They’ve historically been like two icebergs frozen at opposite poles, but here they experience a gradual thawing.

This involves a modicum of faintly sick humour. We re-meet Braxton in a Berlin apartment, where a young blonde woman is pleading “please don’t hurt me”. Braxton demands indignantly why she thinks he would do such a thing, as the camera pans slowly around the apartment to reveal a trail of freshly-slain corpses.

Still, the muscled-up, tattooed Braxton’s journey from robotic killer to something moderately more human is explored quite skilfully by Bernthal, and there are some droll scenes where he manages to goad Christian into exhibiting some faint flickers of brotherly affection. The theme of emotion versus intellect finds an echo in Christian’s secret weapon, Harbor Neuroscience. This is a cadre of child computer geniuses who treat the internet as an enormous playground, cracking and hacking everything with carefree abandon. For instance, within moments they’re able to extract a photograph from the phone of an unwitting bystander, whose cheerful selfie happens to have caught a prime suspect passing by in the background.

An extra layer of cerebral jiggery-pokery is added by the crafty introduction of a phenomenon called “Acquired Savant Syndrome” (eg where somebody with a serious brain injury suddenly becomes a chess genius), perhaps a hint about how Christian became what he is. For instance, we see him briskly dismantling the fake tax returns of a villainous takeaway pizza mogul with super-speed mental agility, while his instant ability to master a complicated line-dancing routine to Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” is merely the icing on the cake (pictured above, Christian and Braxton chill out).

The denouement demonstrates how our protagonists can eventually be capable of doing the right thing, not to mention their special gift of being able to walk unscathed through torrents of automatic gunfire with barely a flesh wound. If you’re looking for gritty realism it isn’t here, and yet the film wrings some real emotion from its themes of betrayal and abuse and crime and punishment. And it has some good jokes. Are the Wolff brothers secretly yearning to be the new Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?

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