Review: The taxing sequel 'The Accountant 2' balances the books, not the tone

Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal and Gavin O'Connor follow 2016's seriously good 'The Accountant' with a sequel that doubles the drama and comedy but adds up to less.

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“The Accountant 2” subtracts everything that worked about the 2016 original, a marvelous romp that starred Ben Affleck as Christian Wolff, a neurodivergent numbers geek who freelances as an auditor and assassin. Of all the action-thrillers about killers with a very peculiar set of side hustles, “The Accountant” was smart fun as opposed to dumb fun or simply dumb, as with this leaden sequel, in which Chris’ grisly efforts to bust up a human trafficking ring are duller than watching him talk about taxes.

Returning director Gavin O’Connor and screenwriter Bill Dubuque take it as faith that audiences will remember the backstory. I’ll fill you in just in case: Chris is a math savant who struggles to understand empathy. (Pointedly, he never specifies his place on the spectrum. “I’m just Chris,” he says here.) As a child, his rigid military father refused to accommodate his son’s eccentricities, beating it into the boy that he must fight for his place in the world — literally. Hence, grown-up Chris is a nomadic misfit with two talents: sharpshooting and solving quadratic equations.

Ludicrous? Sure. But that first script was well calibrated with subtle humor and romance. It also boasted an astute supporting bit for Jon Bernthal as Chris’ estranged younger brother Braxton, another mercenary sensitive to how his wants always took second place to his sibling’s special needs.

Bernthal has a bigger part this time and his character has been reworked into a comedic sidekick with his own kooky wiring. Whereas Chris has too little emotion, Braxton has far too much — he’s touchy, insecure and prone to temper tantrums, so caught up in his own psychodrama that he loiters around his murder sprees gossiping about his brother to a dazed hostage. I can get the reasoning to build out his role, but the gags are clunky from the get-go, including a tedious stretch in which Braxton whines about his urgent desire to adopt a corgi. Even Chris thinks that’s weird, pegging Braxton as more of a cat guy.

O’Connor has teased that he sees this series as a trilogy; the third film will be a buddy comedy he describes as “‘Rain Main’ on steroids.” I wish he’d gone ahead and made that movie now. The jokey scenes are the only ones he’s interested in. They’re also the only ones that tend to be any good.

This go-round, everything’s louder and more banal. (And there’s not even enough math). Chris used to have a grim, distinctive tic of executing his enemies in the head; now, the climactic battle is just a spray of bullets. He’s also been transformed into a stereotypical, lightsaber-brandishing nerd with a wardrobe of wacky T-shirts. One reads Awesome Sauce.

The best running joke tracks Chris’ attempts to get a girlfriend. He starts the film at a speed-dating event where, in a great montage, he disappoints a procession of dewy singletons who shrivel up when this hunk comes across as cold and rude. “Eventually, this body will be a corpse,” he tells one woman. The second fantastic rom-com sequence is set at a honky-tonk bar, but, like the opener, it leads to a narrative dead end.

Still, I’d watch “The Accountant 2” on an airplane twice more if it had a dozen other scenes like these. Pity it feels a sense of obligation to have Chris shoot more than lovelorn blanks. The movie seems to recoil from its own hammering dramatics, with Bryce Dessner’s score toggling uneasily between jocular blues and dour, overcompensating strings.

Of every possible subplot, it’s hard to think of a worse one than Chris and Braxton’s hunt to find a family of disappeared Salvadorans. Chris is particularly taken by a photo of the son, Alberto (Yael Ocasio); he sees himself in the boy’s far-away stare. For villains, we’re given slave traders Burke (Robert Morgan) and Cobb (Grant Harvey), although we never know much them about besides Cobb’s loud plaid pants and memorable croak. There’s also an enigmatic platinum blonde lady hitman (Daniella Pineda), who is revealed to have undergone a heck of a cosmetic glow-up.

It’s not the movie’s fault that it’s getting released right when Americans are being asked to pay sincere attention to immigrants who are vulnerable to kidnapping and abuse. But it is a problem when “The Accountant 2” peddles Pizzagate innuendo while treating its victims as mute, human-shaped wadding — almost none of the Latino characters get any real lines other than a huff of gringo-friendly Spanish. (“Estupido!” “Vamanos!”)

Adding to the buzzkill, this sequel brings back its most strait-laced character, Marybeth (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), the director of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, who weaves into the Wolff brothers’ rescue mission mostly to lecture them when they operate outside the law. Federal agents can’t kidnap and detain people, she insists. The movie is so unsure what to do with her that her two big moments are an implausible brawl and her delight at finding a comfortable office chair.

Frankly, the more trifling the crime, the better this franchise’s comedy aspirations would work. Divide my affection for the first movie by the few clever beats here and it’s enough to get me to see what O’Connor is calculating for “The Accountant 3.” But for the love of Gauss (as in Carl Friedrich Gauss, the prince of mathematics), I hope that sequel isn’t any more serious than “Who Shorted the Accountant’s Bitcoin?”

At least that ridiculousness would match the revelation here that Chris funds an academy of brilliant neurodiverse children able to hack into any camera, computer or city streetlight. I think the film intends these youngsters to be a semirealistic gang of X-Men, but it doesn’t give them any dialogue or individuality; they’re treated more like the orphans in “Oliver Twist.” They probably don’t even get paid. What a write-off.

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