FILM REVIEW: "The Accountant 2" is a weightless, market-tested shoot-em-up
The Accountant 2 continues the story of the titular hitman/accountant/hacker tycoon Christian Woolf (Ben Affleck), who takes on a variety of inter-contracted crime syndicates using his autistic proficiencies. This may strike you as slightly tokenising, that’s because it is - director Gavin O'Connor called the project “Rain Man on steroids” himself. Yet, while Rain Man drew criticism for Hoffman’s portrayal of an individual with a neurological disorder, The Accountant 2 feels more culpable, partly because it barely engages with the condition at all. Throughout the film, I was waiting for this character’s condition to manifest itself in any meaningful way. It seems to be the subject of every second conversation, and the butt of many “oh, how awkward” gags, but beyond that – really nothing. With the arrival of his show-stealing brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) came the opportunity for O’Connor to perhaps pose some new questions for his protagonist about connection in neurodivergent families. Credit where it’s due, at one point, Braxton asks if their lack of correspondence is due to Christian’s condition, or his own inadequacy as a brother. At this point, you might consider that maybe there was something underneath The Accountant 2’s action-movie gloss, but that notion evaporates before long.
Christian is, essentially, like any other guy. He’s not even one of the “everyman” action heroes (a la Novocaine, Nobody, The Family Plan), which have been so popular recently, because he’s not disenfranchised enough to represent the average person today. Instead, The Accountant 2 justifies itself purely by lip-service about the mysteries of autism and regular, narratively hollow cutaways to the undeveloped, ultra-hidden, ultra-removed Harbor Neuroscience; a centre for militarising those with savant syndrome.
If the elements of representation are really as empty as they came across on screen, there must be another reason The Accountant 2 was dragged through every stage of a mass-release production. That answer is money, of course. And, yeah, obviously – Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, action sequel. But I think there’s something underneath that, too. This isn’t about Autism, or the almost untapped unique opportunities that neurodivergence in film presents, or even just about putting out another good/bad cop action flick. Whenever Christian Woolf commits a heinous act of violence or discovers the crime syndicate or his brother’s exploitative psychopathy, the audience doesn’t have to expect the conventional reaction. When child-trafficking rings serve only to be the backdrop of an Epic™ shootout, we can simply nod and wait for the next shot. When we don’t have to question why specially-abled government agencies can control every Bluetooth device in the service of national security,, we can say “that’s convenient!”.
The context of modern audiences as mass-consumers of physical and systemic violence in every form of fictional and journalistic media has rendered us numb to the usual trappings of The Action Movie. The Accountant 2 has recognised this, and found us an explanatory remedy for the cognitive dissonance: Our Accountant has a Condition! The script is allowed to be shallow, rapidly paced and morally bankrupt, because we don’t understand his condition, and we aren’t told that it’s important to try. When our protagonist has a condition, we can accept our own.
Although it functions well as a weightless action film, The Accountant 2 only serves to commodify but not normalise autism or make it seem less othering. It is an empty product of the market, and a symptom of a media sphere less interested every day in the emotional impact of our art. Jon Bernthal is funny, though.
2/5
