The most hilarious part—funny because of the irony given the current American political landscape—is the shoehorning of trafficking brown immigrants as a plot point.
Accountant 2 (2025, directed by Gavin O’Connor) builds upon the first Accountant film, wherein Ben Affleck plays a cross between Rain Man and Rambo. It is a superhero comic book trope: being born “different” would mean having a different set of skills.
Yet, there is inherently something manipulative about this movie. In the first film, the military father of a son with special needs refused professional and expert medical treatment for his son. Instead, the special needs (neurodiverse) boy, along with his “normie” (neurotypical or simply “normal”) brother, gets to travel with their father as they are trained for combat.
The father wanted to prepare his boys to become Spartan warriors amidst the cruelty of the world. But to train his neurodiverse son under the guise of self-defense—who turns out to be both an amazing accountant and a precise killer—should be considered fodder for therapy about daddy issues.
The father is the silent specter in Accountant 2, as both brothers philosophize between fight scenes about their personality disorders and their inadequacy to process their lives productively. By productive, I mean without bloody deaths. Yet, Accountant 2 should be praised for its fight choreography.
The funny parts would be the erasure between extrajudicial and legal approaches, when they employ a small army of neurodiverse children to track down suspects and gather information at warp speed—making the sharp American intelligence sector look like bungling fools. This is like watching a mutant superhero academy, except the powers come from a differently wired brain.
The film touches upon neuroscience in an arbitrary, haphazard, and dangerous way—implicating that damage to the brain is like “becoming” neurodiverse. True, there have been reports of stroke victims waking up having inexplicably learned a different language, developed skills, or changed personalities. Yet how many of these stories of transformation compare to the utter physical deterioration brought by strokes or brain damage? This is like the action film equivalent of hitting your head and waking up with amnesia—seen in too many soap operas over the years.
The bright spot of this movie is the brother duo of Ben Affleck (the neurodiverse accountant Christian Wolf) and Jon Bernthal (the normie brother Brax). Their banter and masculine energy are compelling and not cringeworthy.
Clearly, the brothers love each other. This movie deals with brotherly love stemming from an abusive father, with an eventual reconciliation played out in a typical Mexican standoff.
The most hilarious part—funny because of the irony given the current American political landscape—is the shoehorning of trafficking brown immigrants as a plot point. Many manly Western films have featured white people vs. white baddies and their brown cohorts in a desert showdown, where testosterone wafts with the dust. This is the part where the brothers become white saviors, and their body count is justified and celebrated. But given Trump’s white supremacist MAGA landscape, will this be celebrated, or will critics say that the brothers saving brown trafficking victims is just Hollywood DEI?
