I suffer from what I call an Afflecktion: a love for Ben Affleck that’s also just a little apologetic, as if I know there are classier actors out there—Cillian Murphy, Adam Driver, Josh O’Connor—who are of course all great, but who just don’t ring the same bell. Affleck has one of those “Sure, why not?” faces. Play an eccentric sneaker mogul, an alcoholic construction worker who finds redemption coaching high school basketball, a tortured actor who played Superman on TV but longed for meatier rules? How about the most somber, miserable Batman ever? Sure, sure, sure, and sure: why not try it all? In 2016 Affleck accepted, probably with pleasure, the challenge of playing a neurodiverse hit man who lives out of a weapon-filled Airstream trailer and has trouble forging meaningful relationships with other humans. The Accountant—directed by Gavin O’Connor and written by Bill Dubuque—was a surprise hit. For all kinds of reasons, including a pandemic, it has taken nine years to get a sequel, but at last, The Accountant 2 is here; written and directed by the same duo, it builds on every promise of the first movie, even as it’s also—mostly—jauntier, looser, more entertaining. Affleck once again plays a guy more comfortable with infinitely complex mathematical equations (and firing automatic weapons) than he is with talking to a beautiful woman in a bar. Because—sure, why not?
The story begins reasonably enough before dissolving into something almost unapologetically unfollowable. Ray King (J.K. Simmons, returning from the first film, albeit briefly), having retired from his job as Treasury Director and now moonlighting as a private detective, meets with a mysterious, affectless young woman, Anaïs (Daniella Pineda), in a cheerfully seedy Los Angeles bar. He shows her a picture of a small family from El Salvador, father, son, and mother, imploring her to find them. She has no idea what he’s asking her to do, or why; she looks at him blankly as he urgently tells her of something called “acquired savant syndrome.” Then Ray is murdered by a bunch of thugs who have been trailing him, and his former employee, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), now head of the cheerfully named Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, tries to find out who killed him and why. She’s flummoxed, though he has left a clue: When Ray realizes his goose is cooked, he ducks into a bathroom stall and carves a message on his forearm: “Find the accountant.” Luckily, Marybeth knows just how to do that, and before long Affleck’s Christian Wolff has wheeled into town in his trailer, his face unreadable but his spirit somehow willing to help.
The plot mechanics include human trafficking and unconscionable treatment of child migrants: these elements, somber and depressing, especially given certain current political realities, often throw the movie’s vibe out of whack. It’s the kind of picture that makes you feel a little guilty for having fun—as if we needed to be reminded that horrible things happen in the world we live in.
But the tonal wobbliness of The Accountant 2 is offset by all it does right: The story expands on the role of the bucolic New Hampshire school, the Harbor Neuroscience Academy, that gave Christian the confidence to function in the world in the first place. We see a gorgeously appointed, cheerful facility, where children whom Robert F. Kennedy Jr., would consider hopeless are instead encouraged to explore and sharpen their gifts. Led by Christian’s childhood friend Justine (she’s played by Allison Robertson; her voice, with its proper British pinkie-up diction, is provided by Alison Wright), these kids make short work of solving every logistical puzzle Christian and Marybeth toss their way. Best of all, Jon Bernthal returns, with lots more screentime, as Christian’s brother Brax, also a highly efficient contract killer. (He gets a great entrance, nonchalantly checking into a Berlin hotel, where he’s given a gun in a presentation box; we don’t see what he does with that gun, but before you know it, he’s surround by an array of dead baddies who don’t know what hit them.) We get a better sense of the bristly dynamic between these two brothers: Christian, it becomes clear, hasn’t contacted Braxton in years—he promised to do so at the end of the earlier movie, and then just took off. Braxton, wounded, refuses to warm up to his inscrutable brother, and then relents: they share an evening hanging out atop Christian’s trailer, where Braxton reveals that he’s trying to adopt a dog. Christian informs his brother, flatly—because that’s the only way he knows how to express himself—that he’s really more of a cat person. And damned if he isn’t right.
As they bicker and spar, Bernthal and Affleck are unsurprisingly wonderful together, because each is wonderful on his own. Bernthal has that beefy, craggy tough-guy look that you just know is a front for a tender heart; he’s an heir to the late, great Fred Ward. He’s a great foil for Affleck, who seems to be having a deadpan blast in The Accountant 2. In an early scene, poor Christian attends a dating event, having gamed the system, with his perfect numerical logic, so that all the potential lovelies are lined up at his table. They look at him, their eyes shiny—because the man playing this character is, after all, lantern-jawed Ben Affleck—as they try to make small talk: “I’m Ann Renee, and I just love love LOVE accountants!” says one, only to feel rebuffed when Christian looks at her with a face of stone. Later, when he and Braxton stop into a country-and-western bar for a drink, a sweet, gorgeous woman in shorts and cowboy boots flirts with him unapologetically, only to slink away when his face signals nothing but bewilderment. Braxton lectures his older brother—earlier, he has assessed Christian’s chances of landing a date and declared them zero, thanks to Christian’s puffy-soled “Forrest Gump shoes”—telling him that all he had to do was ask the woman to dance. Why is that beyond him? “Because my brain doesn’t work that way,” he blurts out, and we understand the frustration roiling behind those evenly set eyebrows, even though his face betrays none of it.
That’s the Affleck touch. The Accountant 2 is not, and is not trying to be, a movie about the realities of autism. Even so, it challenges us to think about how our brains work, why we do and say the things we do—and to recognize that even though we may think there’s a normal way to respond to social cues, not everyone is wired the same way. Affleck takes the character of Christian Wolff seriously, even as he also understands everything that makes him funny, including the way he fills out, perfectly, a ridiculous Sriracha “Awesome Sauce” T-shirt. This is the Ben Affleck we’ve come to know and love: the actor who takes everything very seriously, but who also knows how to say, “Get over yourself, dude” just in time. In the end, in that bar, Christian does join that beautiful young woman on the dance floor, because he realizes that line dancing, so orderly and predictable, is right up his alley. He’s having a great time; you can see it on his face, sort of. This is just one example of what Ben Affleck can do, when he’s not winning Oscars for producing or screenwriting. He thinks everything through, and then he jumps: Sure, why not? The least reckless of all actors, he makes taking chances look easy. And he can make Forrest Gump shoes look hot, which may not be something you want to think about, until you actually see it.
Read the full article here
