'The Accoun2nt' is the Autistic 'Lethal Weapon 2'

Autism, accounting, and assassinations in abundance. A+! Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal make beautiful music together.

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Amazon/MGM Studios

It’s hard to believe that The Accountant, starring Ben Affleck as an autistic accountant assassin, is eight years old. It feels like it can’t possibly have been that long since it came out, perhaps because I’ve been loudly demanding a sequel ever since, while peppering countless group chats with this gif:

At long last, the sequel is finally here, and I’m happy to report that it’s about an autistic assassin accountant (Affleck) who has to save a Salvadorian autistic boy from an international human trafficking ring, while fighting off a female superkiller who has been afflicted with ASS (Acquired Savant Syndrome), giving her powers (and neuroatypicalities) comparable to Affleck’s. Affleck (Christian Wolff!) accomplishes this with the help of his suave brother-from-the-same-mother Braxton (Jon Bernthal, reprising his role as the least likely “Braxton” in history), a team of autistic superhackers in a Professor Xavier-style autism academy somewhere, and a square agent of FinCEN played by Cynthia Addai-Robinson. That premise is Oscar-worthy, and the Bernthal-Affleck execution is even better.

ASS, as we soon learn, is a type of super-autism, caused, in this case, by a car accident-induced traumatic brain injury, giving the victim special abilities in chess, eye-hand coordination, and hand-to-hand combat, along with abnormal aggressiveness, an antisocial disposition, and symptoms of amnesia. Just imagine this script got injected with Super Screenwriting Serum and you get the picture.

The plot, which was honestly too complex to understand on first watch, kicks off with JK Simmons as Raymond King, the chief of finCEN, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, who has come to a smoky bingo parlor filled with ethnic heavies (some Latino, some Slavic) to meet with the ASS assassin played by Daniella Pineda. He manages to hand her a photo of a nice Latino family (husband, wife, and young son) he wants her to find, just before the whole scene goes sideways in a hail of bullets, fisticuffs, and ballpoint pens to the groin. When finCEN agent Cynthia Addai-Robinson comes to investigate, she finds dead heavies, dead bingo players, and a dead JK Simmons, killed by a long-range sniper in the middle of the street outside, with a cryptic phrase scribbled onto his arm. FIND THE ACCOUNTANT, it reads.

Why all of this had to take place in a smoky bingo parlor, a category of thing I hadn’t even thought could exist, I have no idea. And yet it’s sort of a microcosm of The Accountant 2 as a whole: a movie whose situations aren’t always entirely clear, but are usually so hare-brained inspired that they had me giggling with glee rather than trying to parse them.

The Accountant² (the superscript is canon, according to the title sequence) killing off JK Simmons’ character and essentially replacing Anna Kendrick’s with Addai-Robinson is a risky choice. Yet it also justifies a beefed-up role for the returning Bernthal, whose winning chemistry with Affleck wasn’t explored until the last act of the first movie, and a further expansion of The Accountant’s lore. Late in the first film, we discovered that Affleck’s British handler (the one who gets him jobs doing special accounting jobs for shadowy drug kingpins, essentially the Joan Cusack to his Jon Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank) was actually non-verbal autistic woman Affleck’s character knew from a childhood autism clinic, “speaking” to him through a text-to-speech computer.

The “superhacker in a control room or mobile van unit somewhere,” who can trace a baddie’s identity immediately and help get the hero out of jams by changing traffic lights or turning on building sprinklers, has become a stock character in action movies — usually a cheat code for lazy screenwriters (see: The Union). The Accountant series gives the trope both a slightly-less-thin justification and a half-heartwarming, half-humorous flourish — by introducing us to a basement full of autistic teens competing against one another to hack the cell phone camera of a murder witness. Whereas the lore in, say, the latter John Wick series feels mostly like empty calories and slightly sweaty, The Accountant’s is focused and purposeful.

Meanwhile, the hacked witness in The Accountant² happens to be from Iowa, and so all of her phone passwords, hobbies, and entire persona have to do with, uh… corn. The Accountant² is the kind of movie that you keep remembering funny things about afterwards and breathlessly text friends who also saw it things like “Oh my God, remember Corn_Gal38??”

The plot is a convoluted ouroboros loop of recurring characters and twists that I could never quite untangle, but I never felt like I had to, because The Account²(n)t isn’t really that kind of movie. The soul of it is the hang out (a term probably overused, but nonetheless applicable) — between the lonely, lovable-but-gleefully violent Braxton and his tactless, fastidious, puzzle-loving brother Christian, who can gamify everything but is still trying to figure out the puzzle of human feelings. Christian’s first scene sees him at a speed-dating event, which he has won his way into, we learn, by essentially having figured out how to “beat” a dating app. The scene cuts between Christian being interrogated by the event’s organizers and Christian at the event: where the thirsty single women are shoving each other out of the way to get to the table with Christian, a handsome, put-together guy in sensible shoes who clearly has a good job and seems safe. One by one he alienates them all, too focused on his own interests (the Airstream trailer he lives in because of a tax loophole) and too dismissive of theirs (friends, hiking, the idea of love at first sight). I never thought I’d see someone incorporate Dating on the Spectrum into a shoot-em-up, but The Account²nt is just that inspired.

As enjoyable as that scene was, the movie only heats up when Agent Marybeth Medina (Addai-Robinson) reaches out to Christian for help with her case, and Christian reaches out to his brother, Braxton, the salt-of-the-Earth, equally-lethal yin to Christian’s yang. Braxton wants to adopt a corgi so he’ll have a friend, and in one perfect scene the two go to a country-western bar together. Christian soon discovers that he has a knack for line-dancing, while Braxton discovers that cowboy bars are a great place to find guys who want to fight. Director Gavin O’Connor leans into the natural set up/punchline rhythm of Bill Dubuque’s writing, Affleck and Bernthal are perfect, and the whole thing ends up being more than the sum of its parts and wildly enjoyable.

Certainly the script could’ve given Addai-Robinson a lot more to do, and I’m pretty sure Pineda was cast mostly on the basis of looking like someone who used to have a different nose, but I suppose one movie can’t have everything. And The Accountant 2 already gives us so much. The Bernthal-Affleck neuro-oppositional buddy comedy was so fun that I kept forgetting that they were caught up in a cat-and-mouse game with a female assassin afflicted with ASS. And how do you forget a female assassin with ASS???

Action movies as bellicose as The Accountant(²) are rarely funny on purpose, and are usually worse when they try (see: The Working Man), but Accountant screenwriter Bill Dubuque could easily staff a sitcom. It’s a good thing he hasn’t, because he might be the most genuinely funny action-comedy screenwriter since Shane Black. The Accountant² is like an autistic Lethal Weapon produced by Sylvester Stallone, and in an even rarer feat, is actually as fun as that sounds. Thank God someone still remembers how to make low-stakes action movies.