‘Accountant 2' review: Ben Affleck's back in a human trafficking sequel where guns beat spreadsheets
To get along like they mean it, the estranged brothers played by Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal in 'The Accountant 2' learn by doing. What they learn is that most reassuring of all action movie lessons: Killing makes you a better, more human human.
The makers of the sequel to the 2016 film, both directed with slick assurance by Gavin O'Connor, might argue with that interpretation. The new one offers a bigger, more brutal string of kill-shots and corpses, either morally justified as part of the story or, at one point, treated as a throwaway gag illustrating what Bernthal's Braxton actually does for a living.
Screenwriter Bill Dubuque also wrote the first movie and, in better form, worked on 'Ozark.' His many narrative tracks in 'The Accountant 2' send the band of brothers to save terrified child prisoners of a cartel-run compound in Juárez, Mexico, from a mass grave being dug not far away. That climax may be spatially difficult to follow — for a while you can't tell where the boys are in relation to all the anonymous cartel goons they're killing — but storywise it's icing on the cake for Chris, an underworld accountant and mathematical phenom on the autism spectrum, and brother Brax, a European-based wiseacre super-assassin.
The cake: A fiendish, cartel-run human trafficking ring, with claws deep inside the United States. A prologue set in and outside of a Los Angeles nightclub brings J.K. Simmons back from the original 'Accountant' as the now semi-retired U.S. Treasury Department honcho and onetime adversary of Chris, currently on the hunt for one of the children who have been disappeared. The boy, now a teenager, had an El Salvadoran father, affiliated with the MS-13 criminal gang, who crossed the border into America. This particular detail, in light of the erroneously deported Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, comes under the heading of 'accidental topicality.'
Given its premise, you wouldn't expect 'The Accountant 2' to go for quite so much buddy comedy, but life is full of surprises. Screenwriter Dubuque clearly enjoyed writing reams of banter for Affleck and Bernthal, though the results have a way of tossing a wrench in the film's pacing. A second super-assassin and surveillance genius, played by Daniella Pineda, slinks through the movie with a hidden agenda and a sharpshooter's eye. Her sights eventually are set on the U.S. Treasury deputy director (Cynthia Addai-Robinson, very good) who teams up with the bros, against her ethical principles, to bust the trafficking ring. Meantime, at the neurological institute, a friendly black-ops group of teen surveillance and hacking all-stars aid and abet our heroes' activities.
'Challenging' is the word director O'Connor used in a recent ScreenRant interview, describing the task of 'handling such heavy subject matter as human trafficking and then trying to make a fun, entertaining film.' He's hardly the first. Last month, Jason Statham took out similar human-trafficking trash in 'A Working Man.' Championed by conservatives, the solemn yet pulpy anti-trafficking biopic 'Sound of Freedom' in 2023 scored a quarter-billion at the box office. And there's 'Taken,' the franchise built on Liam Neeson, for which many real-life anti-trafficking activists have no love.
If there's a third 'Accountant' outing for what has been laid out as a trilogy, O'Connor has indicated it'll be more about heart and brotherly love and odd-couple comedy, with a side order of killing. If so, I hope Addai-Robinson returns in a bigger role; here, she's stuck being the annoying advocate for rule of law and due process ('We have no right to detain anyone!') in a bro's world where, as John Wayne said in 'The Green Berets,' 'due process is a bullet.'
'The Accountant 2' — 2 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for strong violence, and language throughout)
Running time: 2:05
How to watch: Premieres in theaters April 24
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
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