In THE ACCOUNTANT² – yes, that’s the onscreen title – Ben Affleck (DAREDEVIL) returns to his brilliantly ludicrous role of Christian “The Accountant” Wolff (Chris for short), autistic math genius raised in the martial arts who works as a forensic accountant for the mob and on the side helps people with their taxes or with things that require shooting people. In this one part 1 supporting character Ray King (J.K. Simmons, DARK SKIES) is nervously waiting at a bar to meet with a legendary assassin called Anaïs (Daniella Pineda, JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM/DOMINION) when unknown gunmen ambush them and kill him. If I had remembered that he was just a guy from the Treasury Department and not some underworld friend of Chris’ I would’ve gotten a kick out of how good of a fight he puts up. But the scene is kind of upsetting because there are so many bystanders running away screaming and it reminds me of a mass shooting.

Anyway he manages to write “FIND THE ACCOUNTANT” on his arm before he dies, so another part 1 character, Treasury agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson, COLOMBIANA), does just that while trying to figure out what her boss was working on and finish the case. One cool gimmick is that Ray’s landlords cleaned the apartment, pulling down his wall of photos, receipts and tax documents related to the case and dumping them in a box. She hangs them back up in an order that seems logical to her, then falls asleep and Chris completely rearranges them into what looks like a bizarre pattern, but of course he’s figured out what ever little piece of it means.

The case involves an old photo of a couple from El Salvador and their son who has gone missing. For reasons I didn’t catch, Chris feels they need the help of his brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal, THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD), who was kind of an antagonist in part 1 and who he hasn’t seen since whatever went down back then. They become a mismatched buddy team with Braxton as the loose cannon, which is funny because Chris is already a murderer who lives in an Airstream trailer armed with a mini-gun. I guess really they’re both the bad cop and Marybeth is the good one who very reluctantly tolerates their methods as they punch a pimp over a motel ledge, cause tough guys at a front organization to cry, etc., following a trail that leads them to South America. Along the way there’s some jokes, a wonderfully crazy twist about Anaïs’ backstory, a pleasing arc of brotherly bonding, and some violence. Most of the sorts of things you’d want.

The fight choreographer is David Conk (THE BIKERIDERS) and fight coordinator/previz action designer is Vlad Rimburg (UNLUCKY STARS, NEVER BACK DOWN: NO SURRENDER, BAAHUBALI 2, WOLF WARRIOR 2) but I’d say the action is only so-so. One scene has what appeared to me to be post-production shakes, but it was J.K. Simmons fighting, so I don’t blame them too much. There’s a pretty brutal (and not fair) fight between the female leads, Pineda looks very cool and graceful, Bernthal gets some good punching, and of course it follows the rule that a guy like The Accountant has special knowledge where if like five guys attack him it doesn’t matter because he knows the exact movements to twist their arms around and break their bones. Don’t mess with an equalizer, dummy. He doesn’t use the PREDATOR-sized guns this time but of course there’s a bunch of shooting including two or three head shots that made a guy in my theater yell “OOOOOOOOOHHHHH!!!”

I have nothing against the action, it just doesn’t stand out.

One nice thing about not having rewatched THE ACCOUNTANT since the first time is that I totally forgot there was sort of an Xavier’s School For Gifted Mutants type place tied into The Accountant’s operation. So it was a delight when a good way into the movie he suddenly calls upon a room full of non-verbal children to BLACKHAT their way into security camera recordings to figure out who King was meeting with. They can’t get a good look at her face but they see that a woman happens to be taking a selfie nearby so they use facial recognition to identify the woman, they hack into her lap top and her smart home and they set off her printer and doorbell to distract her while they email the photo to themselves. And then you bet your ass they enhance it. You know how if there’s a low res photo you just say “ENHANCE” and zoom in and then it becomes clear? They do that.

Kind of more interesting than the mystery is the story of the brothers being together and working out some of their relationship issues. Since they grew up together Braxton can get away with getting frustrated with Chris’ quirks and saying “You’re so weird!”

There’s lots of humor between them, which is a perfectly reasonable way to lighten up a story about human trafficking. But each of the brothers is introduced with several minutes of wacky shtick that I swear must’ve gotten a presidential pardon to escape the deleted scenes section on the blu-ray. For Chris it’s a scene about going to a speed dating event where he somehow cracked the dating app’s algorithm to seem like the most eligible bachelor. I found it painfully unfunny but, full disclosure, a couple people in my theater were laughing pretty loud. Braxton’s is much stranger – a long scene where for a while you don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about but he’s in his underwear in a hotel room nervously practicing a phone call where he will try (and fail) to convince a dog trainer to let him pick up the dog a few weeks earlier than scheduled? It feels especially superfluous since it’s immediately followed by another weird scene that deliberately leaves you in the dark for a while about why he’s eating ice cream and making small talk with a terrified, crying woman. I think that scene would’ve worked better if we weren’t already confused about the dog thing.

The comical tangent that I did enjoy was the one where the brothers go to a honky tonk (which they note is weird to have in L.A., but just go with it). Chris catches the eye of a friendly cowgirl (Dominique Domingo, “Hollywood Party Dancer – Girl #2,” LA LA LAND) but totally flubs it when she tries to flirt with him. Braxton gives him shit about it and Chris blurts out, “because my brain doesn’t work that way!” in frustration, which I found actually kinda moving. But then he rebounds when he wanders over to the dance floor in his dorky sneakers, studies the patterns of the line dancing and is able to join in. The scene justifies itself even more when some asshat (John Patrick Jordan from the EVIL BONG series) gets jealous and wants to fight him. All action movies are allowed, in fact encouraged to stray from the plot in order to either have a bar fight or stop a convenience store robbery.

Part 1 director Gavin O’Connor (WARRIOR, JANE GOT A GUN) and writer Bill Dubuque (creator of Ozark) both return for the sequel. It’s weird that they got to make a follow up to THE ACCOUNTANT even though it’s nine years later, and I’m grateful for this unlikely occurrence. I don’t know for sure that it was in development that whole time (maybe they just decided to do it recently) but if it was that might explain some of the odd tangents and tonal shifts, and there are certain ways it feels like a movie made for a previous era. I’m not saying this killed the movie for me but it’s my duty to note that it’s one of the ones that try to appeal across the political spectrum but the attempts at being thoughtful end up feeling like plausible deniability for right wing propaganda. Marybeth is there to voice the reasonable view of The Accountant’s activities: you shouldn’t be invading that woman’s privacy, you shouldn’t be putting a guy in the trunk of my car, oh shit why am I working with two serial murderers, etc. I think it’s meant to temper the amorality, but it ends up making it worse because within the story she’s wrong about all that, she has to learn to accept that her ways don’t work and theirs do. Which, if taken seriously, is a despicable world view. It might be better to just give us our anti-heroes straight instead of treating it like a debate.

More to the point, in the tradition of PEPPERMINT, RAMBO: LAST BLOOD and SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO this one’s about Americans fighting against evil cartels. Yes, the people they’re trying to help are an innocent El Salvadoran family who immigrated to escape danger back home, that’s very trenchant and good. Yes, there is a white guy that’s kind of the top guy behind everything. Yes, we’re all against human traffickers, it’s fun to see them get splattered on screen. I appreciate all these gestures. It’s still a movie that name drops MS-13 and promotes the idea of vicious South American gangs running rampant on American soil, the favorite bed time story of the white supremacist authoritarian regime currently terrorizing all immigrants or people who could be falsely accused of being immigrants. I mean there are plenty of movies that are way worse about this stuff but it’s kind of a bad time to exploit the topic at all, is all I’m saying.

This doesn’t seem to be the prevailing view, but I think the first movie is much better, the way it slowly unveils the ludicrous but awesome world of this extreme character, how his operation works, how he got this way. The sequel is far looser, less disciplined, now that they just get to riff on the idea. But the first one was one of the movies I labeled the IDKJBWGBIT (I Didn’t Know Jon Bernthal Was Gonna Be In This) movement. In my review I said “as he so often does, Bernthal takes a character who’s not on screen that much and makes him really exciting and intriguing.” This time I did know Jon Bernthal was gonna be in it, the main attraction is that he’s promoted to co-lead, and that does bring something new to it.

Bernthal gets most of the laughs and has the best fight scene, but also he’s an actor who feels it deep, even in a sequel to THE ACCOUNTANT. Playing to that strength they gave him a scene that for me adds some depth to the whole endeavor. The brothers have been reunited for a while and they’re bickering and being wise asses with each other and suddenly Braxton sounds emotional and tries to ask if the reason Chris didn’t come looking for him for eight years was “because of me or because of you?” In other words, do you not like me, or do you just not know how to show me that you like me? The conversation doesn’t go well, but it’s a rare moment of vulnerability for Braxton. It’s tragic, these two men whose lives would be so much happier if they just knew how to express their emotions, but one of them is on the spectrum, and the other one is just macho. That’s real shit. I always appreciate movies dissecting that.

THE ACCOUNTANT² is no THE ACCOUNTANT in my opinion, but it’s above average weekday matinee action bullshit. My equivalent of a pretty good week at church.