THE ACCOUNTANT 2 - Mark Reviews Movies

The Accountant 2, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 24, 2025

Unsurprisingly, The Accountant 2 falls into the same traps as its predecessor. In Ben Affleck's Christian Wolff, the sequel still has the intriguing concept of a character at its core. This is a man with autism who is highly skilled at unraveling the puzzles of real-life mysteries and is also quite adept at hurting or killing in self-defense or to protect the innocent. Screenwriter Bill Dubuque, returning to the follow-up along with director Gavin O'Connor, still can't see this character past the most obvious, however, especially when the sequel, just as with the original, is mostly about its plot.

Yes, Christian has yet another mystery to solve in this one, and he yet again gets some help from people who can't quite understand him or his ways. The big development at the end of the first movie was the revelation that the hired killer looking for Christian was actually his brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal), a man who was also raised by the brothers' father in various fighting skills and with firearms. It suggested that there really might be more to Christian than his condition and his ability to hold his own when action arises, but Braxton's return here just gives the material more reason to find some humor in how emotionally distant and socially unaware our protagonist can be.

One imagines whole essays could be written about Christian, his behavior, and his portrayal as being equally suited to solving mysteries and cold-heartedly inflicting pain on or killing multiple people across these two movies. A review, obviously, isn't the place and a film critic isn't the person to dissect such matters in any depth or with any real knowledge on the subject.

Still, it certainly feels wrong that any development of this character begins and ends with him being either the butt of some jokes or someone who only excels at those two activities—solving puzzles and engaging in violence. Almost thankfully, though, the sequel does pretty much get straight to the action and the plotting, which means we don't have to think about the bigger picture of Christian serving as one of the higher-profile depictions of a person with autism in the movies.

The story this time has Christian coming out of hiding several years after the events of the previous movie. Since then, he seems to have led a plain and mundane life, living out of a camper and even looking for romance at a dating convention in Boisie—by gaming the algorithm of the questionnaire the service uses to have a line of women waiting to talk to and inevitably be disappointed by him. The movie plays that scene as a gag, of course, as it does with another potential moment of romance at a country-western bar, where Christian treats the steps of a line dance as a pattern to memorize.

Someone who knows Christian is killed in the prologue, sending federal financial crimes agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to find the former criminal accountant. The murder is connected to an anonymous assassin played Daniella Pineda, who was the last person to speak to the pair's mutual acquaintance alive. Quickly, Christian pieces together a string of killings around the world with the disappearance of an immigrant family from El Salvador, and Dubuque doesn't exactly make the piecing-together process coherent or logical, it's almost irrelevant.

After all, the real point here is to watch Christian at work—assembling photos and documents pinned to a wall in a pattern that most people cannot comprehend, raising evidence of complex math on the fly, jumping to violence when it's necessary to protect himself, to defend others, or to get some information out of an unwilling interviewee. Medina is more by-the-books, obviously, and scolds Christian for his tactics, and when the puzzle-solver calls in his brother to help with some of the dirtier work that needs to be done, the federal agent is even more unsettled by how far Braxton has gone and will still go.

The more involving scenes cut through the plotting and the broad strokes of these characters, although there's only a few of them to be had here. They're conversations between the brothers, who haven't seen each other since their chance reunion near the end of the previous movie and now find themselves unsure of how to talk to or even treat each other. That's because Christian is the way he is, as he plainly puts it, and for all his tough exterior, Braxton just feels as if he might have done something to put up a block between him and his brother. These are fine scenes, not played as a joke and once again hinting that maybe this movie might break through the surface of its labyrinthine plot or shallow characterizations.

The Accountant 2, though, ends with a length shootout, so that doesn't happen this time, obviously. Maybe another sequel could, if these filmmakers or some new ones actually stopped to consider that there clearly is more to Christian than some gimmick, as well as to his relationship with the world and others than a punch line or an action sequence.

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