3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Accountant 2

2025, Gavin O'Connor (The Accountant) -- Amazon

Since Bill Dubuque wrote the previous movie, he garnered success with Ozark. Neither Kent nor I wrote about that acclaimed show; I watched one episode of it, and where most people suffer superhero-fatigue, mine is more strongly seated in "horrible family crime show" fatigue. For some reason, I more inclined to watch a "damaged but brilliant" detective/investigator show, but watching terrible families do terrible things, even if they are the protagonists, is just not my thing. Is that fatigue? I think I was tired of it before it became a thing.

Anywayz, this is a round-about way to respond to my own comment on the first movie -- that Dubuque would be worth watching. I responded well to the first movie, and even in my rewatch, I still greatly enjoyed it. It was a small movie, quirky. I realized something during my rewatch; I am not convinced that Christian (Ben Affleck, Argo) is an assassin at all. I think he does accounting work for the mobs (plural is important) and because he works with so many, and because of how he and his brother were raised, he is prepared for any sort of violent repercussions. Thus his entire life is contained within an airstream trailer, half domestic necessities, half weapons locker. But he does not kill for a living. He's an accountant.

This movie picks up some time after the first one. Raymond King (JK Simmons, Red One), the Financial Crimes director from the first movie, now retired, is doing private detective work for someone named Anais (Daniella Pineda, Cowboy Bebop). They are meeting in a bar, but someone has followed him or maybe her, and in the gunfight, King is killed, but she slips away. Later, in the morgue Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), who followed in King's footsteps, rising in the ranks of FinCEN with the help of Christian and his handler, reads "find the accountant" scrawled on King's arm.

Something about preambles, and recounting them, always interests me. I like a good (re)establishment of a coming story. Questions arise, reminders are provided. Motives are offered. Medina does indeed call our "hero" and despite being more uncomfortable with his business than her mentor ever was, she begins to work with him. Christian does his "thing" taking all the boxes of information King had collected, and collating it into a story about a family from El Salvador fleeing to America. But the father was killed, found in a mass grave, and ... who was King looking for? The mother? The child? Both? Who is Anais? Why does she want them found? So much of the movie is about filling in little blanks, while providing so much more, establishing Anais as a boogeyman killer, someone both law enforcement and criminals fear, another violent person available by a single phone call.

It leads them to LA. And Christian reaches out, in his usual neurodivergent way, to his brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal, Ford v Ferrari), whom he hasn't talked to since he blew up Braxton's last job. Braxton is a proper hitman and security thug, the usual Goon or Henchmen hired in other movies to do the dirty work for proper Bad Guys. He's pretty pissed at his brother but comes to LA anyway. And thus, the movie becomes a ... cough... buddy comedy?

Its still pretty dark in its content, a story about trafficking and coyotes and child slavery, but the "fun" comes from watching Braxton and Christian interact. It wasn't my thing. Sure, it is funny. Christian gaming a match making agency but still creeping all the women out. Christian adapting well to country line dancing. Braxton always being brash and loud mouthed and violent and ... basically an asshole older brother. Sure, I chuckled. But it wasn't my thing.

Eventually the movie degrades / succeeds into a typical action-thriller mass gunfight. The brothers are tracking down the whereabouts of the surviving child from El Salvador, in a child labour camp in Mexico, while Medina finishes King's investigation and discovers what happened to the mother. Its a weird, odd, very interesting spin on Christian's neurodivergence, having the mother suffering a brain injury, losing her memory, losing her personality, becoming a ... well, world-class killer in about four years, aka Anais. Spin-off character? In Hollywood's current weird confusing world of franchise love, why not? 

Braxton and Christian shoot and blow up their way to heroism, some loose ends are tied up (with murder) and Anais's son, who also happens to be autistic, moves into that weird group home where Christian grew up, and where his childhood friend, and now handler, runs.... an intelligence agency?

Dubuque doubled and tripled down for this movie. Its not at all what I was expecting from a sequel. Its a fine movie, seriously, a decent well-done action-thriller, but... still, not what I wanted.

Part of me wanted to blaze through this movie writeup, and the next few blog posts, focusing on the ultra-violence, the gun play, as all of them are dominated by such, as are my viewing habits. But in the end, that contributed very little to my memory of the movie, beyond a recollection of scenes in the trailers depicting a very different version than what ended up in the final movie. I wonder if that will play out similarly in the next few movie's posts.