April 21, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Gavin O’Connor
Culture Representation: Taking place in the United States and briefly in Germany, the action film “The Accountant 2” (a sequel to the 2016 movie “The Accountant”) features a predominantly white group of people (with some Latin people and African Americans) representing the working-class, middle-class, wealthy and the criminal underground.
Culture Clash: Christian Wolff, who works as an accountant for wealthy criminals, teams up with his younger brother Braxton to find a missing immigrant family and a mysterious assassin who is hunting human traffickers.
Culture Audience: “The Accountant 2” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners, the 2016 movie “The Accountant” and formulaic but well-acted action movies that have several comedic moments.
“The Accountant 2” overcomes its predictable action formulas with a scene-stealing performance from Jon Bernthal. This overstuffed sequel is best enjoyed by viewers who’ve seen 2016’s “The Accountant.” “The Accountant 2” is more stylish and comedic.
Directed by Gavin O’Connor and written by Bill Dubuque (the same director/writer duo for “The Accountant”), “The Accountant 2” is much more of a cross-country road-trip buddy film than “The Accountant,” which had the title character as very much a loner protagonist, with most of the action taking place in the Chicago area. “The Accountant 2” had its world premiere at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival. The characters in the movie travel to various states, including Maine and California.
“The Accountant 2” assumes that viewers know about some of the spoiler information that was revealed in “The Accountant.” In “The Accountant,” Christian Wolff (played by Ben Affleck) is an accountant who works for wealthy criminals. Christian has a high-functioning form of autism. At the end of the movie (spoiler alert), Christian finds out that an assassin who was hunting him is his younger brother Braxton Wolff (played by Bernthal), who was estranged from Christian for several years.
Christian gets client work with help from a secretive operative named Justine (played by Allison Robertson), who was revealed in “The Accountant” to work at Harbor Neuroscience Academy in Hanover, New Hampshire. Justine, who has autism that makes her non-verbal, uses a voice translator device that makes her voice sound British (voiced by Alison Wright) as a way to disguise her identity. All of this background information is necessary to get the full context of the characters who are in “The Accountant 2.”
Seeing “The Accountant” also gives viewers an explanation for why Christian and Braxton are expert combat fighters. As shown in “The Accountant,” their strict and abusive father (played by Rob Treveiler) was a former U.S. Army officer in psychological operations. When Christian and Braxton were pre-teen children, he forced them to go through rigorous military training that he oversaw entirely himself. The mother of Christian and Braxton left the family because she could no longer tolerate the oppression that he was inflicting on her and her children.
In “The Accountant,” Christian was also being hunted by Ray King (played by J.K. Simmons), director of the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, with Ray tasking data analyst Marybeth Medina (played by Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to do most of the legwork in the investigation. Ray retired at the end of the movie, and it was implied that Marybeth would get a job promotion. In “The Accountant,” the chief villains were executives at a robotics company involved in financial fraud.
In “The Accountant 2,” the chief villains are human traffickers who exploit undocumented immigrants from Latin America. In the beginning of the movie, Ray is a private detective looking for a family of three undocumented immigrants from El Salvador who disappeared eight years ago when they entered the United States: Edith Sanchez; her husband Gino Sanchez (played by Abner Lozano); and their son Alberto Sanchez. Alberto (played by Yael Ocasio), who was 5 years old when the family disappeared, is now 13 years old.
On April 7, 2025, Ray is in a seedy bar somewhere in the Washington, D.C. area. It’s the type of dive bar where people are playing bingo in the scene where Ray goes there to meet a stranger for this investigation. Ray is meeting with a mysterious assassin/mercenary named Anaïs (played by Danielle Pineda), who apparently has important information on this missing persons case. Ray wants to hire Anaïs to find the missing Sanchez family.
The meeting between Ray and Anaïs has barely started when some armed goons, who work for the human traffickers, storm into the bar and cause a shootout that kills Ray. (This murder is already revealed in “The Accountant 2” trailers.) Anaïs is able to slip out of the bar unharmed, but surveillance video caught her on camera leaving the bar at the time of the shooting.
Marybeth is now deputy director of the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. When she finds out that Ray has been murdered and that he wrote “Find the Accountant” on his arm, she knows she has to find Christian again. Christian is currently an escaped convict who is a fugitive from the law. Marybeth finds Christian, of course.
Marybeth promises that she won’t arrest Christian if he helps her solve the mystery of Ray’s homicide. And as already revealed in trailers for “The Accountant 2,” Christian enlists the help of his brother Braxton. When they find out that Ray was looking for the missing Sanchez family, that becomes part of the investigation too. It’s a bit much and makes “The Accountant 2” at times very unfocused and messy.
Viewers will have to suspend a lot of disbelief in several of the movie’s scenes, particularly when it to comes to Marybeth, who acts more like a homicide detective than someone investigating financial crimes. “The Accountant 2” also does a terrible job of explaining how Marybeth is able to spend all of this time hanging out with Christian and Braxton with no supervision. Someone in her position would have to answer to a lot of people about her travel activities across the United States.
Marybeth becomes a frequently awkward third wheel to the bickering brothers Christian and Braxton, who are complete opposites of each other. Christian is methodical and stoic. Braxton is impulsive and emotional. Braxton is a very loose cannon with a bad temper, which predictably gets them into more trouble. Christian loses his temper too, but he’s more robotic about it.
Marybeth spends much of her time scolding Christian and Braxton, as if she didn’t know what she was getting into by teaming up with two violent criminals. “No more violence,” she tells Christian in a laughable part of the movie when he viciously beats a shady witness to get the witness to tell him certain information. Marybeth sees Christian and Braxton commit many crimes and eventually has to pretend that she never saw these crimes in order to continue working with Christian and Braxton.
“The Accountant 2” (which has Affleck as one of the producers) goes off on a few tangents to show that Christian is making an effort to “lighten up” and have more of a social life. As already seen in a trailer for “The Accountant,” Christian goes to Idaho for an event called the Boise Romance Festival, where he does speed dating for the first time. (The results are disastrous for Christian.) He has a much better time on the road trip with Braxton, when Christian does some country music line dancing at a bar.
The back-and-forth banter between Christian and Braxton is the most entertaining aspect of “The Accountant 2,” which has very generic and uninteresting villains. The human trafficking network’s operations in the Americas is led by Burke (played by Robert Morgan), who looks more like an accountant than the movie’s title character. Burke has a sleazy thug named Cobb (played by Grant Harvey), who does a lot of the dirty work that Burke doesn’t want to do.
Burke has a grudge against Anaïs because she ruined some of his human trafficking business almost two years ago. And just so the movie makes it clear that this human trafficking network extends beyond the Americas, Burke is seen making phone calls to the person he reports to: a mega-rich European named Batu (played by Andrew Howard), who gives the impression that it would be a major scandal in his high-society circles if people found out that much of Batu’s fortune comes from human trafficking. Batu’s presence in the movie just raises more questions that the movie doesn’t answer, because Burke and his crew seem awfully understaffed if they’re working for someone who is as wealthy and powerful as Batu.
The amusing scenes between Christian and Braxton follows a tried-and-true formula of many comedic male duos: One is the “straight man” who is calmer and more level-headed, while the other is the “wild one” who is more likely to go off the rails. One of the reasons why Braxton is the most interesting character in the movie is that even though he’s a ruthless killer, he has some neurotic quirks and some surprising vulnerabilities, especially when it comes to pet animals. (You’ll have to see “The Accountant 2” for more details.) The rest of the cast members’ performances are capable, but not outstanding.
“The Accountant 2” is one of those over-the-top action films where people who are outnumbered and outgunned still manage to fight their way out of situations. Just like in “The Accountant,” there’s a surprise twist involving someone’s identity. “The Accountant 2” invigorates what could have been a stale sequel by making Braxton a charismatic eccentric and a major part of the story. “The Accountant” franchise has now entered sequel territory, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the franchise spawns any spinoffs based on the Braxton character.
Amazon MGM Studios will release “The Accountant 2” in U.S. cinemas on April 25, 2025. A sneak preview was shown in U.S. cinemas on April 15, 2025.
