In 1984, “The Terminator” became one of the pop-culture touchstones of its decade, though it’s almost hard to remember that when Arnold Schwarzenegger was first tapped to portray that glowering cybernetic killer, the casting was a bit of knowing joke, one that spun off Arnold’s borderline comic lunkishness as an actor. (It’s not a compliment, exactly, to say that you were born to play a cyborg.)
Ben Affleck is a far better actor than Schwarzenegger, but nine years ago, when Affleck was cast as the title character in “The Accountant,” the role carried some of that same frisson of meta japery. For Affleck, winning as he can be, has often had a blockish, overly square, slightly inexpressive quality. And it’s precisely that aspect of his persona that makes him so perfect as Christian Wolff, an autistic savant who works as an accountant for mobsters and terrorists, using his surreal numbers acumen to clean up their fraudulent books. He is also, not so incidentally, an efficient action bruiser.
You could say, in the broadest sense, that “The Accountant” was a “Jason Bourne” thriller with Rain Man at its center. But that wouldn’t do justice to the submerged wit of Affleck’s performance — or to the even better one he gives in “The Accountant 2,” which premiered tonight at SXSW. Speaking in a low flat monotone, with facial expressions that range from blank to blanker, he’s a lot more plugged-in than Dustin Hoffman’s character in “Rain Main,” but Christian’s personality is limited by the fact that the only way he knows how to communicate is by spouting objective information. That’s what he thinks a conversation is. Within that way of being, he’s a rather personable stoic brainiac, but it’s that naggingly neutral quality — Affleck as emotional android — that shapes Christian’s prowess as an action hero. He’s empathy impaired; this allows him to inflict pain.
As much as I enjoyed Affleck in “The Accountant,” the movie itself was a rather dismal mess. The director, Gavin O’Connor, tried to stage it with a quirky humanity, but the script, by Bill Dubuque, was all over the place, as if it had been fed through a shredder. So going into “The Accountant 2,” I pondered the silver lining of it all. To me, this franchise had nowhere to go but up.
And that, I’m pleased to say, is exactly what happened. “The Accountant 2” is an agreeably loopy hyperviolent good time. O’Connor is back in the director’s chair, and the screenplay, once again, is by Dubuque, who has a knack, if you can call it that, for writing scenes that sprawl and meander to the point that you’re half enjoying them and half scratching your head going, “What is the goddamn point of this?” That aspect of his writing drove me nuts in “The Accountant.” This time it has resulted in something as entertainingly pulpy as it is unlikely. “The Accountant 2” is one of the only thrillers I’ve seen you could characterize as a hangout movie.
The plot has something to do with Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), now a deputy in the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, trying to save the members of a family of Central American refugees whose photograph is in the possession of her boss, Raymond King (J.K. Simmons), when he’s gunned down in the impressive opening set piece. Who’s the affectless blonde-with-black-roots assassin (Daniella Pineda) who arrives to meet him? Stay tuned for some “John Wick” world-building.
Marybeth teams up with Christian, who is still living in his silver PanAmerican Airstream RV (it’s the only space his automaton imagination needs). He uses his acumen to narrow down the search, even as the scenes slam into each other like slow-motion bumper cars. It’s fun to see Christian do his strikeout version of speed dating, or survey a bunch of photographs and tax forms to parse clues that would be invisible to anyone else. And when he and Marybeth visit the crooked head of a pizza company that once employed the immigrant mom, Christian bedazzles and befuddles this sleaze by figuring out — based on his most popular pizza — that he’s money laundering. He then twists the guy’s arm out of its socket to get the information he needs. Can we really call it sadism if our hero (unlike, say, Jason Statham) takes no pleasure in it? He’s just doing what objectively works.
There’s no way that they were going to make an “Accountant” movie without Braxton, Christian’s brother, who’s like his more reckless counterpart. He’s not autistic, but Jon Bernthal, with that leer of arrogance, his hair standing up thick and high enough to make him seem like Affleck’s sociopathic twin, plays Braxton as if he could be on the spectrum. These two become a dark-side comedy team: the Thug and the Numbers Cruncher.
When Braxton launches a plan that involves inviting a trio of sex workers into their motel room, the connection to the central plot is so roundabout that you flirt with checking out of the movie; but give it time and it all adds up. There’s a team of YA autistic hackers who, in one of the cleverest scenes, with each kid seated at a different computer, manipulate every screen and appliance in the home of a random stranger to retrieve the photograph she accidentally snapped of the blonde assassin. And the way that assassin was created is a little movie in itself, one having to do with acquired savant syndrome (which, as presented, is pure sci-fi).
Through it all, Christian is lonely, haunted by the lack of connection enforced by his personality. But he shows the beginnings of a way out of his trap in a crowd-pleasing scene set at an L.A. honky-tonk bar. Stoked by a woman who comes over to flirt with him, he uses his observational skills to participate in a country line dance. Most of “The Accountant 2” is enjoyable in that way, the scenes poised between having a purpose and ingeniously killing time. But when the film reaches its rescue climax, set in a children’s compound in Juarez, it becomes weirdly generic, less flaked-out fun than the rest of the movie. Up until then, “The Accountant 2” establishes that it’s now a franchise to reckon with.