The Accountant²: Brotherly Love and Neurodiversity

This followup to 2016’s The Accountant opens in a bingo hall. Semi-retired deputy director of FinCen Raymond King (JK Simmons) pursues a case. He hopes Anais, an assassin, will help him find a missing Salvadoran boy, but she declines. King’s gunned down in the restroom, and when his protege Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) identifies the body, she spots a message scrawled on his forearm— ‘find the accountant.’

The accountant in question is Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), who’s neurodivergent. We know this because at a dating event, he bores women with tax advice. He also places his breakfast foods in neat stacks and has no friends. He’s not close to his brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) either but having an assassin in the family is often useful.

The women in this movie (Medina, Anais, and Justine, who works with autistic children) are allowed to be strong characters and are key to the storyline. For example, Anais turns out to have a direct connection with the missing boy. But the women’s stories always feel secondary to the movie’s intense focus on the relationship between the two brothers, who somewhat disturbingly grow closer by killing in tandem.