Review by C.J. Bunce
The 2016 Ben Affleck action movie The Accountant was an unlikely surprise hit, the story of brothers brought together by way of common trauma. Affleck played a neurodivergent man named Christian Wolff, who was helped along as a boy by a father after his mother left the family because of the stress of dealing with his condition. The toll on the father and brother was real, leaving the father to use focused training to make them survivors of the attacks by others by way of martial arts skills. Best of all his brother, named Brax, was played by Jon Bernthal, with a personality not unlike his role as the Punisher in the Marvel universe. If that all sounds like a superhero movie, it’s because it has all the elements of the best comic book stories, especially with recent Batman actor Affleck in a very calm, dialed back Bruce Wayne-like persona.
So the big surprise is how much better The Accountant 2 is as it leans into the fun of these characters almost a decade later, while creating a script and hero with respect for the issues faced by anyone with mental or physical life challenges and those who support them. The new release The Accountant 2 is now streaming on Prime Video.
The first film saw Affleck’s Chris Wolff with two skills mimicking all the aspects of superpowers. First he can run numbers as an accountant like nobody since Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man, the kind of Bruce Wayne intellect that allowed him to foil even the brightest mad genius. Wolff’s affliction is of the higher functioning variety, allowing him to appear like anyone else except for some obvious social quirks. This is the kind of hero for the neurodivergent everywhere. The other superpower is his relentless, decisive physical skills as a hired mercenary. His focus, his repeated physical exercises that help him cope, all contribute to his skills. But we never got to see Wolff and his brother really work together until The Accountant 2.
In the first film Anna Kendrick played a garden variety accountant who alerts a company to some skillful embezzlement, but it takes Wolff’s added insight to really see what happened. Meanwhile a glimmer of romance develops. In the sequel, director Gavin O’Connor and writer Bill Dubuque are back, and they push Wolff ahead in this department, not with a single romantic partner, but via modern dating rituals. The more Affleck tries to emulate the socially awkward stereotype, the more he somehow creates a believable Bruce Wayne, more so than in the DC Comics movies. It’s a curious thing to see. It’s all good fun, including a speed dating montage, and you’ll laugh out loud at most of it, even if the mere thought of line dancing makes you cringe.
Cynthia Addai-Robinson is back as Agent Medina, this time researching what happened to a missing immigrant family: a man, a woman, and their son–a timely, touching, gut-wrenching plot ripped from the headlines. Marvel’s J. Jonah Jameson, J.K. Simmons is back, too, this time retired and immersed in the project that brings Medina into the fold. But neither gets the meatier roles of the film. Beyond Affleck and Bernthal, those roles go to two badass women.
First is Allison Robertson as Justine, the comic book “guy in the chair,” here the very best live-action version of DC Comics’ Oracle you’ve ever seen. If you paid attention in the first movie, you’ll follow that Justine is the same little girl who helped Chris in the doctor’s office when he was a little kid. Which revisits the series’ own take on Professor X’s School for Mutants, Harbor Neuroscience. Iron Man’s Jarvis and Spider-Man’s Edith were good, but Justine is real, and that makes her better, especially when she enlists not some computer programs for support, but a team of young, challenged but brainy helpers. It’s a cool but brief update to Little Man Tate.
Second is Cowboy Bebop’s Daniella Pineda, who is almost unrecognizable as a ruthless mercenary with intriguing secrets. She’s a cold and effective supervillain, one-upping the Black Widow of Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh (who knew Pineda was a ringer for Pugh?). Yes, everything about this movie screams “superhero movie.”
Which leaves the unusual brotherly love of the Wolff brothers. This is Green Lantern and Green Arrow working a job together to right a wrong, straight out of DC Comics’ Hard-Travelling Heroes (although Bill Dubuque should have beefed up Addai-Robinson’s role into something more worthy of Black Canary). In many ways The Accountant movies borrow from comics’ Kick-Ass and Hit Girl. The unusual love and raising of Chloë Grace Moretz’s Hit Girl by Nicolas Cage’s Damon Macready would be familiar to the Wolff brothers. After you watch The Accountant 2, you’ll want Affleck and Bernthal to continue on as Jason Statham has done with so many action franchises with similarly bland titles (see, for example, The Transporter, The Mechanic, etc.).
A scene where Bernthal’s character Brax beats himself up in front of the mirror before arguing over the release date of a new corgi puppy he’s adopting should go down as one of 2025’s best movie scenes.
I’ve always thought the very best Batman stories of the past 80 years were those stories where Bruce Wayne never gets to don the cowl. Batman was derived from Sherlock Holmes, and Chris Wolff is only the latest legacy of Holmes. Casting Affleck is a pristine choice. This Batman teaming up with this Punisher is something we’ll probably never see in the comics pages, so this film series is quite a treat, shoe-horning great superhero visuals into a drama to get it all onto the screen one way or the other.
Get ready to have a good time. Don’t miss The Accountant and The Accountant 2, both now streaming on Prime Video.
