The Accountant 2: Ben Affleck's merc with a head for math returns with more firepower (2025)

The Accountant 2 (NC16)

132 minutes, opens on April 24
★★★☆☆

The story: Eight years after the events of The Accountant (2016), mob accountant Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) is living a solitary, nondescript life. Senior US Treasury official Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) contacts him about a case involving old friend Ray King (J.K. Simmons), drawing the expert on spreadsheets and silencers once more into violent conflict with a criminal organisation and the assassin Anais (Daniella Pineda). This time, Christian’s brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) is by his side, with both employing the military tactics taught to them by their father.

Welcome to the Accountant Cinematic Universe, or ACU. This sequel to the successful 2016 action thriller has the symptoms of franchise fever – there is more action, bigger set pieces and higher stakes.

But can this series be the new The Equalizer (2014 to 2023) or Jack Reacher (2012 and 2016) when nine years have passed between the first movie and this follow-up? Many viewers will be hard-pressed to remember the events of the original.

Not that it matters. The dead-simple premise is that Christian is a nerd with special skills. To be more accurate, he is an autistic nerd with special skills.

Neurodivergence is the new black, at least in the movie world. On television, men and women on the spectrum are brilliant doctors and lawyers. And, a few weeks ago, in the recently released Rami Malek action thriller The Amateur, they are brilliant cryptanalysts.

To be fair, The Accountant was among the first movies to view autism as something akin to a comic-book superpower. That movie also showed that Christian was trained by his strict military father to suppress the “bad” traits while letting the “good” ones through, like his ability to memorise and regurgitate the US tax code.

One reason that shows like medical drama The Pitt (2025) and K-drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo (2022) get the thumbs up from autism advocacy groups is that they show adults struggling to fit in. There is a social cost to neurodivergence.

In The Accountant, Affleck is lonely and isolated. Is it because he has outbursts, tics or unsavoury obsessions beyond his control? No, it is because he is mildly eccentric and speaks in a monotone.

His handicap – if it can be called that – is used when convenient to the story and ignored when the plot requires him to be ultra-competent. There are a couple of intentionally comedic scenes showing that women think Christian is attractive until he opens his mouth to say something geeky, which they find to be such a turn-off that they leave.

These bits feel forced because normal adults do not react that way. Some might even find his thoughts endearing. At times like these, the accusation that Hollywood is out of touch with the real world carries a ring of truth.

Putting that troublesome issue aside, the rest of the film is fairly decent and much as one would expect from an Equalizer or Reacher. Perhaps realising that Affleck’s character works best when placed against a foil, the story brings in Braxton early on, so the two can spend the rest of the movie swopping bro banter and working out their issues while mowing down waves of henchmen.

Hot take: This predictable sequel delivers competent action and suspense while treating neurodivergence as a convenient superpower rather than a realistic condition.

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