‘The Accountant 2’ Review – Double The Action, Less Of The Affleck
Memorial Day weekend had a glut of releases begging for attention, and among the litter is a thriller with action, character, a big-name cast, nostalgia, and stakes. Most importantly, it is a sequel.
No, I’m not talking about Mission: Impossible – ‘Final Fallout to The Last Reckoning‘ or whatever it’s called. Fear not, we will get to that soon. Right now, I’d rather discuss The Accountant 2, a film I was surprised to find still playing in theaters with plenty of showtimes to choose from as we cruise into June.
It’s making some money and getting generally favorable reviews while also reminding us once again, in case it wasn’t clear, that Ben Affleck is done with superheroes and not looking back. Well, supposedly. He’s still evoking his Daredevil past by teaming with the current Punisher, Jon Bernthal, for some brotherly bickering and some gunplay that isn’t out of place in a comic book movie. It’s just there are no capes or anything (that’s what matters, I guess).
While I don’t hold that against The Accountant 2, I still have to raise the question of whether it’s as good as the reviews and Rotten Tomatoes scores indicate. Moreover, does it stand out against competition like M:I, The Amateur, Working Man, and everything else you already forgot about by now?
The story begins in a bar where, amid a bingo game, Ray King from the last movie (played by JK Simmons in another callback to comic book films) meets with some sort of contact named Anais. She’s played by Daniella Pineda of Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop, who talks with some kind of French or Spanish accent.
That’s hardly the most unique or compelling thing about her. Anais might not look like it, but she is a stone-cold assassin with several kills all over the world.
King sits with her to ask about a family in a photograph he is seemingly looking for, and to talk about an acquired form of savant syndrome, which becomes important later. However, before he can get that part out, enforcers for a human trafficking ring walk in, meaning business. When they get rough, bullets start flying, and King is taken down by a sniper.
This drags his partner, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), into the picture when she has to ID the body. From there, her objectives are to figure out who wanted King dead, and who the mysterious woman he met with is. With no leads, she heeds King’s final note he wrote on his arm: “FIND THE ACCOUNTANT!” In comes Affleck as the hitman on the spectrum, and things start to move.
Here’s the wrinkle, the variable, the proverbial fly in the ointment that would fluster his character: this is Affleck’s movie, but only on paper. He stars and co-produces, yet his place loses out to the myriad other moving parts. Although he gives a pretty good performance slightly outside his comfort zone, and one that gets a few laughs (especially when he participates in speed dating), Affleck is not the most interesting thing about The Accountant 2.
It follows Addai-Robinson as a virtual main character for the majority of the running time, so she is the de facto POV for the audience. Secondly, when Bernthal shows up, he takes command of the whole affair, making me wonder if the film might have been better off focusing primarily on him for all the heart and humor he brings to his and Affleck’s shared subplot.
And yet, there is one other thing I liked more than Affleck. As crazy as it might sound to those disappointed in the live-action Cowboy Bebop, I thought Pineda was really good as the mysterious silent killer. Sort of like Pom Klementieff in the last two M:I’s, she is a lady of few words, but it doesn’t take long to figure out she is a complete sociopath that would fit right into the world of John Wick.
Her plot thread has a resolution that, though emotional, makes less sense the more I think about it afterward. It drips with script magic and deus-ex-machina logic, but I was interested enough to sit through them, demystifying the ghost that is Anais, and explore how she got to be so cold and violent.
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She would have been a suitable antagonist, which this film lacks, outside her periodically becoming an obstacle for Affleck and his allies. She comes close to killing one of them when she picks up a contract sent to Bernthal. I won’t say who it was, but I did mention them above.
The real villain is the human trafficking ring, which isn’t that fleshed out, and serves as a representation of the sociopolitical epidemic itself. The good news is that, as taut and even traumatizing as Accountant 2 is, Affleck and Bernthal ride in and clean house for a happy, nick-of-time ending like the good old action flicks and Westerns of yester-yore.
Overall, The Accountant 2 stands its ground on its own terms. You won’t need to see the first one, and you should have a good time with it. I’d still put Working Man’s baroqueness and Jason Statham factor ahead of it, and I’ll say the same for Rami Malek in Amateur too. How will it stand up against Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning? I’ll let you know before too long. Until then, Accountant 2 debuts this week on Prime Video.
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The Accountant 2
PROS
- Ben Affleck in his fun and quirky performance
- Daniella Pineda, despite what you might expect
- Jon Bernthal
- Well-crafted action scenes
CONS
- Weak, barely memorable villain
- Anais character's origin is compelling, but still very convoluted
- This film still won't make me forget Affleck's Batman
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