The Accountant 2

Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant (2016), written by Bill Dubuque, introduced Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck): a buttoned-down number-cruncher with a sideline as a vigilante avenger. It was a big enough hit for ‘Untitled Accountant Sequel’ to go immediately into development but it’s taken nearly a decade for that project to get off the back burner. Given how long it’s been, it’s an accomplishment that O’Connor and Dubuque call in so many of the original cast — the only absentee is Anna Kendrick, the civilian hero last time out — though you’d be forgiven for not quite remembering who they all are. Then again, it’s easy to pick up the threads between shoot-outs.

The Wolff brothers, Christian and Brax (Jon Bernthal) — once estranged, now on course for bickering-buddy status — team up to help embattled federal agent Marybeth (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) get on the corpse-littered trail of walking MacGuffin Anaïs (Daniella Pineda). Initially a victim of human trafficking, Anaïs has suffered a head injury and developed ‘acquired savant syndrome’ whereby ordinary folk wake up with a) amnesia and b) super-genius assassination abilities. A victim, she’s also dangerous — offering professional killer Brax competition in the murder market – and there’s some tension about whether she has to be killed or rescued.

Like so many action films of the last 15 years — not to mention all iterations of the Jack Reacher franchise — the Accountant movies are superhero films for audiences who can’t take capes and spandex seriously. Besides having J.K. Simmons’ J. Jonah Jameson-alike as a plot-instigating early sacrifice, it offers recent incumbents of Batman and the Punisher in roles which derive as much from comic books as pulp paperbacks. The Wolff brothers’ tech support comes from a school for hackers which is just a jump-jet away from being a Charles Xavier project. Anaïs may have a named medical condition, but she’s basically Wolverine. It’s a fairly long picture at 132 minutes — another Marvel/DC trait — and its impossibly intricate storyline is still just an excuse to pit kill-crazy good guys against hordes of indistinguishable thugs we can be sure deserve to be cut up, knocked down and riddled with bullets.

Recent American bugbears — human trafficking, El Salvadorian gangs — are invoked, but the vigilante field is so crowded there must be a worldwide shortage of killable goons. The Accountant has to look hard to find human traffickers left alive after Jason Statham’s Working Man took them down a month or so ago while working up to the rare sinister bosses who survived the rampage of Rami Malek’s The Amateur.