Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck, left) and his brother Brax (Jon Bernthaler) chat in one of the quieter moments in The Accountant 2.
Did you know that there’s a whole wiki devoted to cataloguing firearms seen in movies and TV shows? I found it because I was looking to verify my assertion that there are multiple rifles reloaded in The Accountant 2.
It’s one of those questions you think that an “artificial intelligence” might be able to answer. But Google’s A.I. had the nerve to respond that it’s “a minor plot point.” That’s so annoying. I don’t need A.I. questioning why I want to know any trivia tidbit. I get enough of that from people. For that matter, I don’t need A.I. agreeing with me on everything either, even though I hardly get that from people.
But at least the search results did lead me to the IMFDB page for The Accountant 2, with which I confirmed there’s at least one rifle reload seen in this movie, in the third act. I won’t elaborate on that too much further, as I don’t want to give “spoilers.” Though it’s not a spoiler to tell you most of the bullets are expended in the third act.
But I will give a fairly detailed recap of the movie’s first act, so you have a better idea of how this movie starts out. And I will freely mention anything that happens in the first movie.
Although it deals with some very timely issues, this 2025 sequel to 2016’s The Accountant is very clearly meant to be taken as escapist entertainment. You can enjoy The Accountant 2 without having seen the first one at all.
I say that because if I hadn’t written a review of the first one, I could have completely forgotten I had ever seen that movie. As I watched this sequel, I only vaguely remembered what happened in the first movie. At no point did I feel the need to stop the sequel and watch the first one again.
Both movies presumably take place in the present day of when they were released, which would mean that all the characters who were alive at the end of the first movie survived the coronavirus pandemic and are still alive at the beginning of this sequel. But for one of them, not for long in this movie. I’m not the least bit worried about spoiling the first movie.
Ray King (J. K. Simmons) is now retired from investigating financial crimes for the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Now he’s working off the record on the case of a missing child, a boy, the son of parents who shuttle between the United States and Mexico. If there’s anything in the movie about their immigration status, I missed it.
But Ray King’s killed before he can make any significant headway on the case, and the only clue about his death is very improbably a selfie taken at night by an ordinary woman who apparently has no fear about being alone in a desolate part of town at night.
FinCEN Deputy Director Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) of course wants to solve her old boss’s murder. So that means also investigating the missing child, who apparently has a major talent for practical mathematics, like maybe a young version of the titular accountant.
A drug cartel wants to exploit the young boy’s abilities. That’s not really explained in the first act of the movie, to heighten the mystery, I suppose. But without my understanding that, a lot of the violence in the first act felt simply pointless. For example, a guy gets stuffed into the trunk of Medina’s car and she objects, but she’s forced to go along with it. Yeah, okay.
I actually thought the rôle of Director Medina had been recast from the first movie, but no, same actor as the first movie. If they had replaced her with, say, Judy Reyes (who currently plays a police lieutenant on ABC’s High Potential), most viewers would not have noticed. So anyway, Medina needs the titular accountant’s help to solve this case.
The titular accountant, Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), has just wrapped up his study of a dating app algorithm, culminating by embarrassing the creators of the app at an in-person event. Christian, if I remember correctly from the first movie, is autistic.
Christian figured out how to make himself look very attractive on the app, and so he had a couple dozen women lined up to talk to him at the in-person event. Of course he has no idea how to sustain any woman’s interest in an actual face-to-face conversation, so he quickly disappoints the women and thus the other men get their chance.
At first, I thought Christian had gotten himself an A.I. assistant. But the assistant gives answers that are correct and on point. Because she’s not actually A.I., but the collected natural intelligence of a few children at a Harvard research lab. These kids can hack into any system and obtain practically any evidence Christian needs for the case.
Director Medina takes Christian to a frozen pizza factory, where Christian quickly deduces that the factory, despite being a successful business, is a money laundering operation. Neither Medina nor Christian are concerned about the factory using the labor of possibly undocumented immigrants.
Despite reconnecting in the first movie, Christian hasn’t talked to his brother, Brax (Jon Bernthaler), in years. Too busy to even pick up the phone? Even just once in the nine years since the first movie?
But now with this case of the missing boy, Christian needs Brax’s help, because there are more bad guys in this world than Christian can beat up on his own. I think Brax is also neurodivergent, but not nearly as much as Christian. If this was explained in the first movie, I don’t remember.
The screenwriter could have done a better job of explaining why the various characters care about the missing boy. For Christian, it's probably because the boy might be neurodivergent in a very similar way to himself. For Brax, it’s probably just about being a hero. I really couldn’t tell you why Ray King cared enough to work on the case off the record, I have no idea.
I give The Accountant 2 ★★☆☆☆ plus a half star. It's half a star less than what I gave the first one, but I should probably revisit that. The DVD doesn’t have special features, but at least it doesn't trouble us with a whole bunch of previews that are annoying to skip through.
The Accountant 2 is rated R “for strong violence, and language throughout.” The violence in this movie is definitely “strong.” Enough bullets fly around in this movie that if you didn't see someone reload or try to reload at least once, you would notice something is amiss.
Although most of the ammunition is expended in the third act, that violence is almost cartoonish. The violence in the first act is much more visceral. As for the language, it doesn’t bother me, it’s just a bunch of garden variety profanities in fairly workaday dialogue. Ben Affleck knows he’s not in a Kevin Smith movie here.
Nudity is very mild. Christian and Brax hire prostitutes, but the men are equally as clumsy with what the prostitutes think they want with them and what the men actually want them for. Which is, you know, the investigation.
