The Accountant 2

The Accountant 2 is a pleasant surprise. It scratches that crime procedural itch, along with paramilitary-style gunplay, for a winning combination.

The Accountant delivered a dependable ‘90s-style throwback action thriller and “The Accountant 2” is much the same, though it embraces a looser, more amusing tone, while playing in a story sandbox that looks like our world, with our issues: immigration, human trafficking, organized crime.

All that counts in The Accountant 2 is that it’s adroitly paced, unburdened by narrative logic (there are almost as many coincidences as corpses) and buoyed by its well-synced, charismatic leads.

Let Jason Statham wreck dudes with “The Beekeeper” and “A Working Man,” and let Affleck be a role model for empathetic masculinity – who can still wreck dudes if needed – with “The Accountant” movies.

The new movie leans into comedy in ways that veer toward the cutesy — Chris at a speed dating event, Chris at a line-dancing night — but the scenes of the brothers together are great, providing glimpses of the co-dependent boys they were before they grew into trauma-stunted men who regularly commit acts of bloodshed.

The truth is that pacing often trumps realism, and The Accountant 2 just doesn’t build enough momentum.

The sequel sticks Affleck and Jon Bernthal in a sitcom episode surrounded by a Sound Of Freedom-style macho fantasy—call it Gun Sheldon. It’s a terrible combination that buries the rapport of its leads in chaotic action, troubling worldviews, and increasingly generic plotting.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

It's okay as an action movie, but the filler in the middle is drawn out, contrived, and bland.

As is often the case, the sequel doesn't quite live up to the first. This is probably because the story in the first part was new and offered surprises. In the second part, the story is rather predictable, and the character of Edith Sanchez is rather unbelievable. The comedic undertone that constantly accompanies us throughout the film ultimately makes it a decent film. But nothing more. The latter part of the film then unfortunately descends into an exaggerated private war battle in the style of a shooting game.

Of course I loved the first one, which introduced the protagonist's story with a crescendo of suspense touching on the complicated relationship with his father and brother, and then analyzed the figures of the agents Marybeth Medina and Raymond King and their role in the vicissitudes of the "accountant" Christian Wolff (an inspired and in part Ben Affleck) but in this second "episode", as I feared, everything flattens out in a needlessly convoluted, boring and not very credible story.

The first movie was so good. The sequel is truly bad. Thin, but scattered plot. Ben Affleck is doing this weird affected voice which he did not do in the first movie and it's so noticeable and off-putting that it almost seems like a parody. There's less action, replaced with clumsy attempts at humor and character development. This does not make the movie better.