Time for Some Violent Calculations

I won’t deny I’ve watched The Accountant more than once. While I don’t think it’s the greatest piece of action cinema, it does have certain charms that are hard to ignore. Ben Affleck puts in a solid, against-type performance as an autistic accountant who also (spoilers) happens to be a contract killer, and he’s backed up by solid character performances from other cast members, including a winning co-lead role for Anna Kendrick as his sort of, but not really, love interest in the film. Plus, there are some decent action set pieces, a few really funny moments, and it’s all backed by a story that actually takes the character’s autism seriously without making it the only part of his character we ever see (or, magically, giving him super powers because he’s autistic). All in all, it’s not a bad movie.

With that said, it’s certainly not a film where I was sitting there going, “man, what I really need is a second adventure for The Accountant.” I wasn’t exactly looking for one when the film first came out in 2016, and as the years ticked on any lingering thought of, “sure, I could watch this character again,” absolutely faded over time. As we got to 2025, and the rumors were finally solidifying that, yes, we were getting The Account 2, the big question in my mind was, “why?” Was there really more to say about the character, his relationships, or his work that hadn’t really been said already.

Having now sat down to watch The Accountant 2, I can absolutely confirm that this was a sequel that lacked any kind of specific purpose. Where the first film absolutely show a different kind of autistic character from what we normally saw in films, but by treating how he handles himself seriously as well as delving into how he was shaped into the person that he is, this sequel is a more generic, and vastly more straightforward action film that doesn’t really have anything to say. The first film was an origin story of sorts for our unlikely protagonist, a man of mystery who seems to be on the side of lawlessness but who very much works on the side of good, but with all of that established, there’s no more mystery for this film to explore. It takes an interesting premise and makes a very by-the-numbers sequel out of the material.

The Accountant 2 picks up eight years after the first film with our protagonist’s one-time Treasury Department handler, now retired P.I. Raymond King (J. K. Simmons), working a case in Mexico. He contacts a mystery woman, Anaïs (Daniella Pineda), who generally works as a contract killer. She has a code, though, and won’t kill kids, which is why King contacts her. He needs someone with her skills to track down a missing boy once all of his own leads went cold. Unfortunately for King, Anaïs has her own enemies on her tail, and when they come to kill her King gets caught in the crossfire. She escapes, he doesn’t, and his body ends up in the morgue.

After, King’s own chosen successor at Treasury, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), gets word of his death. She gets his files and starts digging into his case, but she struggles to figure out what he was working on and why it could have led to his death. Eventually she turns to a source she knows she should trust, King’s mysterious Accountant, Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck). She summons him and he immediately sets on the case, figuring out how to arrange the information and assemble it all like a puzzle. But once they realize what they’ve stumbled into is a very wide, very deep, smuggling operation with ties everywhere, Christian decides they need backup for this very off-the-books job. He calls his estranged brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal), and the two immediately go to work tearing the organization down.

To be clear, there are parts of The Accountant 2 I do like. I appreciate the times where the film lets the character be an accountant, working a puzzle, following clues, solving little mysteries that add up to bigger mysteries. It doesn’t make him a superhero but it does let him use skills he has, and a desire to solve puzzles, in a way that lets the character seem fulfilled. You get the vibe that Christian is always at his happiest when he’s solving puzzles, and while he’s good at being a contract killer, he’d almost rather sit at a desk all day handling numbers and files and solving his puzzles.

I also really liked Jon Bernthal in the film. While I don’t feel like Braxton is a great character – he’s like a very violent puppy dog, which isn’t much different from where he was in the previous film, what little we saw of him there – Bernthal clearly has a blast playing this character. As we’ve seen from his time playing The Punisher, he’s a solid action star who can handle his own stunts very well, and when you couple that with a happy and fun performance from the actor, you get a lot of really great scenes that work simply because he’s there.

With all that said, The Accountant 2 is, in most ways, a very weak sequel. A big part of the problem stems from the fact that once the initial puzzle is solved, with Christian piecing together all the evidence of the white slavery ring and figuring out how it all works, that’s about the time that, normally, his character would fade into the background and let the Treasury Department, who normally he’d call on a case like this, take over. But because he was summoned by his contact at Treasury the film is stuck in this weird void where its main character isn’t a good fit for the story but it doesn’t actually have anyone else it can hand it back to because, you know, it’s his movie.

The first film got around this by having his puzzle go unsolved, so he was invested and had to finish the mission himself. Here, though, he solves the puzzle. He answers almost everything that needs to be answered by the halfway mark. It’s at this point that Medina should have taken the case back and handled everything herself, but the film spends a lot of time spinning its wheels, trying to justify why Christian has to be involved in a case that really doesn’t feel like a good fit for him. He’s awkward in the role of true hero, and the film never really has a solid answer for that.

And while I like Bernthal’s character and could watch him and Affleck’s Christian kick ass in the right settings (the action sequences are still pretty good here, what few of them we get) his character isn’t any better of a fit for this film than the Accountant. He’s a contract killer with few qualms who doesn’t really care about things like “right” and “wrong”, “good” and “bad”. He has a very fluid sense of morality, which is fine for the character, but he’s not great in a quest that requires actual heroes to follow the job through, saving women (and children) from a white slavery ring. Honestly, from everything we know about him, he’s the kind of guy one of these rings would call in to deal with a particularly messy problem. He doesn’t work here as a hero.

It leaves the film marching forward along its ascribed path without actually keeping its characters engaged in the material. Christian (and by extension Affleck) seems bored to be there, and Bernthal’s Braxton is totally confused as to how he got dragged along for the ride. The back half of the film is vapid and empty, buoyed along only by decent performances and a good action climax, but it’s not enough to justify a full two-plus-hours of film. The Accountant 2 is both overly long and empty all at the same time, leading to an unsatisfying watching experience.

You can see this reflected in the Box Office for the film. The movie only managed to garner $102.1 Mil (as of last reporting) in theaters after nearly two months of release (when films make most of their bank in the first couple of weeks) against a reported budget of $80 Mil. That’s nearly double the budget of the first film with a far smaller take on the back end. In all respects The Accountant 2 is a bloated and wasteful sequel, all for a story that really doesn’t suit the character. In the end it’s hard to shake the feeling that my opinion was right: there wasn’t much need for a second The Accountant, as this actual sequel thoroughly proves.