Film review: The Accountant 2 arrives overdue and full of liabilities

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Before we delve into the so-so action-capital-gains-thriller that is The Accountant 2, let’s take a moment to consider just how long it’s been since the two-film franchise’s first instalment. Nine years.

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Nine. It’s not a record for a sequel — Mary Poppins took more than half a century to return — but it is a long wait for another middling chapter of gunplay and autism awareness. The Terminator — not the most fleet-footed franchise — managed to churn out a new movie every six years on average.

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James Bond, meanwhile, has made 25 films since Dr. No in 1962. At a pace of one every nine years, we’d only be up to Live and Let Die by now, with No Time to Die due out sometime in AD 2178.

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But here we are, with badass/bookkeeper Christian (Ben Affleck) and his wiseacre/hitman brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) up against a new posse of bad guys. Anna Kendrick didn’t return for this one, but J.K. Simmons as Ray King is back in one of his shortest outings outside the Spider-Man franchise; he gets killed in the opening scene.

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Fortunately his protege Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) is on hand to both identify his body and carry on his work. She enlists the aid of Christian to help with a case Ray was working on, a South American family who disappeared after arriving in America, but who may still be alive and in trouble. (Current U.S. immigration policy makes this even scarier than it might have been when Bill Dubuque wrote the screenplay.)

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Marybeth is also the audience’s stand-in as she tries to comprehend Christian’s savant skills, which combine crime-solving with occasional crime-breaking. Much of her dialogue comes down to “what are you doing?” and “this is wrong” and “please stop.”

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As directed by Gavin O’Connor, who made the first Accountant and, in between, The Way Back (another Affleck vehicle), The Accountant 2 is an uneven affair, shifting breezily between comedy and brutality. We see Christian failing miserably at a speed-dating event, then watch as he strong-arms a pizza shop owner into revealing the source of his illicit funds. He’s playing with a toy lightsaber in one scene, prepping for a gun battle in the next.

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And without giving away the film’s climax, let’s just say that it’s as over-the-top as they come, with multiple innocents in peril, oodles of faceless baddies, and exactly two protagonists with no end of luck and timing. O’Connor makes the classic blunder of confusing cinematography and gunslinging — the film’s final action sequences are well shot, but no one shoots that well.

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The Accountant 2 isn’t quite as crowded with characters and subplots as the first one, but there’s still a bit too much going on, including a mysterious cadre of young computer hackers who can conveniently do or find anything our hero needs, all while looking like the middle-school cohort at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

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