Review: The Accountant 2 Might Need an Audit

Gavin O’Connor is back behind the camera for The Accountant 2, the late-arriving follow-up to his 2016 thriller about Christian Wolff, the math whiz who balances ledgers by day and balances bad guys by night. The first movie wasn’t exactly a cultural juggernaut, so the sequel enjoys a rare gift in modern Hollywood: a low bar. Simply tightening the bottom line would feel like progress.

On that modest scale, the new chapter comes out ahead. Ben Affleck once again plays Wolff, an autistic CPA whose spreadsheet skills pair neatly—if improbably—with hand-to-hand combat. Affleck’s naturally chatty charisma is tamped down into clipped sentences and averted eyes; the performance still feels odd, yet you sense he’s having fun inside the character’s rigid shell. His best material arrives when Jon Bernthal barrels in as Christian’s brother, Braxton, a charming wrecking ball whose fondness for chaos masks years of sibling frustration. Once the two share the screen, the movie finds the odd-couple pulse it’s been searching for.

Getting to that point takes time. Bill Dubuque’s leisurely script wanders through scenes that feel more like deleted extras than story beats—Wolff speed-dating, or supervising a lab full of teen savants in hoodies that read HACK THE PLANET. Still, O’Connor sprinkles in moments that justify the detours: a clever takedown of a human-trafficking ring hidden inside a pizza chain’s suspiciously low cardboard-box budget may be the year’s most delightfully nerdy action set-piece.

Tonally, the film zigzags between earnest drama and wink-wink pulp. For a story centered on a man who lives by the decimal, it’s surprisingly scruffy—subplots dangle, motivations shift, and the climactic accounting lesson borders on parody. Yet the movie seems fully aware of its own absurdity, and that self-awareness keeps the whole enterprise breezy rather than pretentious.

Will The Accountant 2 overhaul the genre ledger? Probably not. But it does what any decent sequel should: adds up to more fun than you feared, delivers a couple of standout moments, and leaves the books just a little cleaner than it found them. Sometimes, that’s profit enough.