The loathsome Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., gave a speech last week where he said, of some autistic children, they “will never pay taxes, never hold a job, never use a toilet unassisted.” RFK, I’m guessing, hasn’t seen The Accountant, a movie in which an autistic man is so high-functioning he could kick your ass. The character holds a job, goes on dates, fights criminals, and presumably uses the toilet. And considering his profession, his taxes are likely in order.
The Accountant, released in the fall of 2016, starred Ben Affleck as an accountant who’s autistic and does work for various criminal organizations. And because his military officer father rejected autism education in favor of combat training, he’s also good at fighting.
The role of Christian Wolff (among numerous aliases) proved a good match for Affleck’s persona, especially during one of the many fallow times during his career. The original Accountant was a decent-sized hit in theaters before finding huge audiences on cable and streaming.
The autistic community, I gather, is divided on what they think of the film and Affleck’s portrayal. On the one hand, he’s righteous and a badass; on the other, he’s a criminal and ruthless killer—and not played by an autistic actor.
Now there’s a sequel, which is more of a buddy comedy featuring Affleck and Jon Bernthal as his estranged brother. That Bernthal was The Accountant’s brother was treated as a shock in the first movie, but I caught on relatively early, since we knew Affleck had a brother in the flashback scenes, and which adult that brother had grown into was easy to guess by process of elimination.
The action’s strong, as are the performances. However, the second Accountant repeats the biggest mistake of the first film: The plot’s twice as complicated as necessary. One actor from the first film is brought back just to be killed in the opening scenes, so the plot’s about solving his murder, figuring out what happened to a family that was separated after crossing the border, the brothers’ struggle to get along, and their interplay with Marybeth (a returning Cynthia Addai-Robinson), a FinCEN agent with no tolerance for criminality.
The banter between Affleck and Bernthal is a highlight, and considering it’s a movie about a pair of brothers, one autistic and the other not, and they spend a lot of time on the road, it never feels especially like Rain Man. We also get to see Affleck at a speed-dating event, whose algorithm he solves, in a way that makes him way more like an online incel than the film likely intended.
Most of the supporting cast of the first film doesn’t return; there’s no Anna Kendrick, John Lithgow, Jean Smart, or (needless to say) Jeffrey Tambor. The Accountant 2 turns into Sicario in its third act, for an elaborate shootout south of the border. And between that segment and some dialogue about gangs in El Salvador, the film lands with a lot more topicality than was probably intended when it was written.
There’s also the return of Harbor Neuroscience, a sort of Autistic Hogwarts in which kids on the spectrum are put to work helping Christian out with surveillance, spying, and other activities of questionable legality and morality. It’s an Amazon film, although the kind that’s getting a theatrical release. As for Affleck, he’s been in a lot of movies throughout a more than 30-year career, but this is the first proper sequel he’s ever starred in. He did play Batman in a bunch of DC movies, and has reprised various characters in different Kevin Smith projects, including a fake Good Will Hunting sequel called Huntin’ Season. At any rate, he might be the most un-Boston character Affleck has ever played.