Movie Review : The Accountant 2 (2025)
Two years ago, I got irresponsibly high on an edible and walked straight into my living room with one singular goal: watch Jackass Forever and lose my mind. Instead, I passed out sideways on the couch and woke up halfway through a reality show where celebrities get emotional while their relatives sing pop songs they like. And it was great. Not ironically great. Genuinely so. I haven’t seen Jackass Forever to this day, but I have now seen two movies where Ben Affleck plays the same autistic accountant.
There’s a pattern in there somewhere. Maybe I’ll bring it up to my therapist.
Alright, let me try to explain the plot of this movie to the best of my abilities: the director of the law enforcement arm of the Treasury department (J.K Simmons) gets murdered in a dive bar after meeting a mysterious hired killer (Daniella Pineda) to offer her a rescue mission for a Salvadorian family. Because what makes more sense than appealing to a killer’s moral fiber, right? Then he gets killed, but not before writing "find the accountant" on his forearm like a dying oracle in a Dan Brown novel.
So we “find the accountant.” Enter Christian Wolff (Affleck), who is less of a character and more of a thought experiment: What if autism, but also Navy SEAL? He’s joined by his brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal), who’s The Punisher except that he's insecure now. Together they embark on a morality-soaked kill mission that neither of them have any emotional stake in, because... well, movies!
Neurodivergence, bullets and something vaguely moral to do
Here’s the thing: The Accountant 2 thinks it’s being clever by making its heroes neurodivergent and vaguely patriotic, but it doesn’t actually care about either. Autism here isn’t a lived experience. it’s a cinematic party trick. Affleck’s portrayal is so stiff and emotionally muted, he plays like a recently divorced dad who got way too into Bitcoin and now wears New Balances unironically. You know he’s autistic because they told you he is. That’s it.
The rest is just Affleck staring into the distance like he’s trying to remember if he left the stove on.
And what do Christian and Braxton do? They commit murder. A lot of murder. But it’s the "good kind" of murder. The Mission: Impossible kind. Government-adjacent, ends-justify-the-means, screw-due-process murder. Except this time, the government guy who gave them the mission is already dead. Which raises a question no one in the movie stops to ask: why are we doing this again? Who exactly are these people we’re trying to help?
Because that’s what "moral outlaws" do. They find a noble cause posthumously assigned by someone with a badge and a slow death scene, and they roll with it. It’s painfully stupid, but in a way you’re very familiar with.
An action movie, but you do all the work
By now you’ve probably guessed: The Accountant 2 has as much to do with accounting as Top Gun does with the internal politics of military procurement. It’s also not really about autism. What it is (or desperately wants to be) is a slick action thriller with just enough character quirk to trick you into thinking it’s smarter than it is. It’s not.
The movie banks hard on your emotional autopilot. It wants you to fill in the moral blanks. The villains are cartel guys with guns. That’s it. No backstory, no ideology, no flair. Just anonymous brown men with AKs. Cartel members in 21st-century cinema are what Nazis were in the 20th: moral scarecrows the hero can kill without consequence or complexity.
I'm not gonna be intuitively afraid by any foreign-language speaking gun toting maniac in a thriller movie, because most thriller movies in the history of cinema have them. Unless they do something really fucked up on screen, they are corpses waiting to be manufactured by whoever’s shooting at them. You have to tell me why the antagonist is dangerous, otherwise I’m just going to accept that he’s gonna be killed by the protagonist sooner than later.
*
And yet, The Accountant 2 is marginally better than its predecessor. The action choreography is decent. The editing is clean. The runtime isn’t brutal. Technically speaking, it’s a competent product. But spiritually, intellectually, culturally? It’s as much of a dead weight as your fucked up buddy you morally have to drag back from the bar after an ill-fated bender.
It’s a lazy, post-content era movie that tries to cash in on Affleck’s face and your willingness to be entertained without asking why. It wants to feel edgy and meaningful while offering nothing but borrowed valor and bulletproof tedium. It's the cinematic equivalent of eating at Chili’s because it’s right there in the parking lot and you're too tired to think.
But maybe I got it all wrong. Maybe you’ll like it better if you’re high.
4.9/10
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