SXSW '25: The Accountant 2
The Accountant 2 (or as the director likes to refer to it, The Accountant Squared), which had it’s world premiere at SXSW 2025, is a sequel to the 2016 thriller starring Ben Affleck and Anna Kendrick. Full disclaimer, I didn’t care for the first one. But I went into the sequel with an open mind because, after nine years, maybe they had taken away the issues that I had with the first one–like the lackluster take on a thriller, or the general boring vibe of the film–and learned a lesson. Perhaps I was a bit too naive in my thinking because, truth be told, this reviewer didn’t care for the movie.
The story of The Accountant 2 is pretty basic action thriller fare: someone important gets killed, that person knows someone who’s really good at a task, their last request is for someone else to find this person to help solve the mystery, blah blah blah. You’ve seen this movie time and time again, but the one thing that I can credit the movie for is trying to be a comedy. The film opens up with an agent being set up and killed, leaving a clue for whoever finds his body to find Christian Wolff (Affleck), and then immediately cuts to a meet-cute of Christian at a speed dating event. The reason? He intends to break the entire speed dating system as we know it, and succeeds at doing so. Scenes like this and the ones between Affleck and Jon Berenthal, who plays Christian’s brother Braxton, are what make the movie. Fortunately, they’re the majority. The problem is that the movie decides that these moments do not matter as much as the main plot and tries to interject story elements into the film that break up the momentum the comedic moments build.
Credit: Amazon MGM Studios.
Bernthal and Affleck have a genuine chemistry, to the point where it feels like sometimes the camera just rolls and they both improvise. Moments like when they’re in the car driving together and bantering about how they haven’t seen each other in a while, or when they visit the honky-tonk bar and Christian starts two-stepping as Brax looks at him with deep admiration and pride stand out. The two really understood their characters, their relationship and the time that had passed between both films. When the brothers reconnect after years of not having spoken to each other, it feels real. Christian just wants to reconnect with Brax, while Brax feels hurt about the lack of communication. Their banter with each other plays such a huge part of the movie that at times it seems as if it is struggling to keep up with the other departments. The two share so many moments that felt good to watch, like two friends playing brothers, but it’s baffling that this movie exists in the larger movie that is The Accountant 2.
The action here is pretty basic, and at times feels like they had a quota of certain action sequences they had to fill. The gunshots feel empty and the impact is never truly felt. The film culminates in a huge shootout in Juarez, Mexico, but instead of the fight having weight, the scene feels more like our two leads were directed to “look cool” while firing assault rifles, as the extras playing the baddies were just sprinting around and told to drop as if they were being shot. There’s no real weight to any of it, which would be fine in a run-of-the-mill action comedy, but the movie never decides on which tone it wants to pursue. The hand-to-hand fight sequence between Cynthia Addai-Robinson and Danielle Pineda works really well here, but I couldn’t tell if it was only because the movie lacks in the fight department and was just refreshing to finally get to one.
The crowd ate this thing up, so I think it’ll probably release and be a hit amongst audiences, but for what reason? Gavin O’Connor returns with this movie, but seems to have forgotten that he directed the first one and makes a completely different movie than the first. This isn’t bad but it gives you a bit of whiplash when trying to figure out just who The Accountant 2 is for.
There’s a world where I love this movie. In theory, this film hits every mark that I traditionally love and appreciate from an action movie, but the problem is that the genre has moved so far past this type of action thriller that it doesn’t do enough to carve out its own niche in this overcrowded space. It brings me no pleasure to dislike The Accountant 2. It takes a lot to make a movie and based on the Q&A session afterward, it sounds like it was a big passion project for O’Connor and the crew. I guess it would have to be after a nine-year hiatus. Maybe this one just wasn’t for me.
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Blake Williams has a B.A. in Film and Television Production from Ball State University. He aspires to one day be a director, but until that day comes you can find him at a showing of whatever's playing that day or at home alphabetizing a shelf of movies and games and muttering about how he should "slow down on spending."