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In The Accountant 2, Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal Go on a Charm Offensive

By Jesse Hassenger  |  April 23, 2025 | 10:11am
Movies Reviews Ben Affleck
In The Accountant 2, Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal Go on a Charm Offensive
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The charm of Ben Affleck’s performance in the Accountant movies is that it’s not particularly good casting, maybe not even particularly good acting. Affleck can do plenty of stuff well – he makes a primo yuppie, obviously, but he can also be a nimble comic actor and an avatar of midlife anguish – but Christian Wolff, a brilliant and neurodivergent accountant who also has extensive military-style training, may be simply too much of an airport-novel caricature to be playable by such a straightforward, grounded presence (yet also too much of a technical challenge to entice any number of action-first stars). This is a part that has Affleck speaking in a clipped, emotionless tone, stolidly dispatching bad guys when necessary, and also doing gags about tax-prep tips (which, to top it off, often sound more like friendly Google-able advice than the work of a savant-like financial genius). Yet his sheer willingness to search for a real character within the too-high concept, his seeming affection for this by-and-large nonsense, his apparent lack of hesitation to imagine how this man might line-dance, humanizes a movie like The Accountant 2 – a movie that should, by any reasonable standards, be a piece of belated star-flattering shlock. Somehow, the movie rarely feels like an excuse for Affleck to play a handsome wealthy badass genius, even when it has a scene where women literally queue up for a chance to date his character. Early on, when Christian builds his own algorithm to maximize his speed-dating chances, his faked profile pictures look hilariously like a “normal” photo of the actor; his tax tips quickly thin the herd.

That scene is one of many surprisingly lengthy character-based bits in The Accountant 2, which picks up eight years after the original. As many genuine fans of the first movie may nonetheless not remember, The Accountant closed with Treasury Director Ray King (J.K. Simmons) retiring, with former analyst Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) taking over his position as Christian’s potential contact within the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. (The ongoing health of this division as depicted here may make The Accountant 2 feel like a period film in short order.) Christian, meanwhile, has taken his AirStream trailer on the road, continuing his accounting business in relative obscurity, via his neurodivergent partner Justine (Allison Robertson, replacing Alison Wright from the earlier film).

But when Ray King is killed in the midst of his personal investigation of a missing family from El Salvador, he leaves Marybeth a message to get in touch with Christian to help solve this disappearance. He in turn seeks help from his chatty assassin brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal), who he hasn’t seen since the climax of the previous film. And so this Accountant morphs from origin mystery and uneasy sorta-romance (or at least flirtation) to mismatched buddy comedy with a dose of familial sentiment, all the more impressive considering that it comes from the same team of director Gavin O’Connor and screenwriter Bill Dubuque.

Less impressive is how The Accountant 2 runs a scant four minutes more than its predecessor but feels significantly longer. Though not produced directly for Prime Video by the Amazon-owned MGM, it nonetheless has signs of streaming bloat; it could also just be the common sequel pitfall, particularly in the IP-worship era, of assuming that audiences loved every minute of its predecessor with all their hearts, and could only possibly crave more, more, more.

Yet at the same time, it’s the scenes that take extended time-outs from the narrative – the scenes that a ruthless studio executive might well order airlifted out entirely – that make The Accountant 2 a weirdly memorable experience. The film’s central mystery is essentially reverse-engineered from one pretty good twist; its downtime, with the brothers engaging in surprisingly extended arguments and heart-to-hearts, is a lot more fun. Most of the action stuff, by comparison, is also a disappointment; some satisfying hits from all the fists and bullets flying around, but not much sustained tension. Even the mysterious badass who seems created largely for a climactic fight disappears for long stretches while the boys go out drinking to blow off steam and bond. Hey, no rush!

There is, however, some fun business with Christian and Justine’s team of amateur computer experts, operating out of a well-funded (by Christian, naturally) home for neurodivergent youth, a goofy riff on those Bourne-style control room wonks. Unfortunately, these scenes also make it easy to imagine a bunch of DOGE morons projecting their tech-savior self-images on these extra-government geniuses, with Christian as their Elon-coded benefactor. That’s the true power of Affleck and Bernthal’s collective charm offensive: They can make a junky story about a computer-brained savior of human-trafficking victims resemble a whimsical hangout session.

Director: Gavin O’Connor
Writer: Bill Dubuque
Starring: Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Allison Robertson, Daniella Pineda
Release Date: April 25, 2025

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.

 
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