‘The Accountant 2’ doesn’t always add up

As a real-life accountant, there’s a guilty sense of pleasure I get seeing someone with my job title kick ass and take names.

It must be how every police officer feels watching “Die Hard,” or how a doctor feels during reruns of “ER” or “Grey’s Anatomy,” or an archaeologist with the “Indiana Jones” franchise. 

Then again, all those films could be considered some of the least realistic depictions of said jobs, becoming a burden on the real professionals who have to endure countless questions about the practicality of what the on-screen protagonists do.

Luckily for me, nobody went into the 2016 film “The Accountant” thinking it was going to be an honest reenactment of the day-to-day lives of your friendly bean counters. Never mind all the guns and talk about drug cartels – the total absence of Microsoft Excel is an immediate red flag for believability.

In a move that made me quite displeased but is admittedly the wiser business decision, “The Accountant 2” (titled “The Accountant²” within the film for no logical reason) features just about the bare minimum of actual financial work. Mentions of 1040 tax returns, fraudulent claims of depreciation, and EBITDA are the only buzzwords handed out here.

The moniker of “The Accountant” has as much to do with bookkeeping for our returning protagonist of Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) as real bats have to do with Batman, or wolverines with The Wolverine.

Considering Affleck’s previous stint as The Caped Crusader within Zack Snyder’s DC films, there’s a comfortable familiarity to seeing him again don superhuman abilities within the shell of a mortal man.

Previously depicted as a sort of antihero, returning screenwriter Bill Dubuque and director Gavin O’Connor have morphed Christian into a full-blown crime fighter.

Mentions of his criminal past are kept to a vague minimum, and the mystery he sets out to solve here is of the murder of Ray King (J.K. Simmons, who, at 70 years old, finally gets the action setpiece that his exceptional physicality deserves), the federal treasury agent who was once on Christian’s tail.

Ray’s death unveils a web of drug cartel dealings, human trafficking, and other illegal activity near the southern U.S. border.

The plot is borderline incoherent for much of the runtime. Worse, it’s horribly uninteresting once everything starts clicking into place.

The stakes eventually become so high that they become instantaneously weightless, the villains’ threats so heinous that there’s no way they would ever be executed in a studio blockbuster.

Dubuque doesn’t seem to care all that much about that, instead dedicating more time to Christian’s antics away from the criminal underworld, such as rigging a speed dating system (complete with comedic slideshow transitions!) and reconnecting with his equally violent brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal).

The film leans heavily on the chemistry between Affleck and Bernthal – its saving grace on several occasions. Their comedic banter is reliable, and even a few touching moments of reconciliation are put in for good measure.

O’Connor struggles to merge the clashing tones, creating a hilarious whiplash effect between a scene where Christian gets a girl’s number at a line dancing bar, only for the next scene to mention human trafficking of children and that a person’s attempted murder is why they have superhuman cognitive abilities.

There’s also a team of similarly skilled autistic children who provide intelligence to Christian from afar, which makes them fully complicit for each of the dozens of corpses that are stacked up. The ludicrousness of this plot point still has me questioning if I should take offense to it or not.

Despite its ho-hum competence, the original “The Accountant” packed a semi-interesting exploration of a morally gray protagonist who hides behind a black-and-white profession.

In the act of making the sequel as fun as possible, those edges have been severely sanded down.

Sure, there’s more personality than before, but not a sense of a unique identity. In an effort to please everyone, the creators have blocked all potential for someone to find something special here.

Amazon MGM Studios will release “The Accountant 2” in theaters nationwide on April 25.

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Eden Prairie resident Hunter Friesen is a film critic who owns and operates The Cinema Dispatch, a website where he writes reviews, essays, and more. He currently serves as the president of the Minnesota Film Critics Association and travels the globe covering film festivals both big and small. To view his entire body of work, you can visit his website and Instagram.