I knew Accountant 2 was the pick this week so I went back and watched the original Accountant which honestly I don't remember even coming out.
Accountant 1 was a surprisingly good movie. Baffleck plays an Autistic kid trained to be a fighter by his Army father that somehow gets into doing accounting for the Mob and vigilantes as needed. The setup is a bit extra but the actual movie is fairly grounded. Affleck plays the part more or less straight here and it all works. Jon Bernthal is also in it playing a mercenary character. The story is well written and it moves along at a great pace. Highly recommended.
For some reason 9 years later we get a sequel and oh boy does it ever change the formula. This movie isn't grounded or played straight at all.. it's a buddy action comedy. Think more or less Lethal Weapon. For some reason Affleck is now doing a cross between Rainman and Milton from Office Space and it's just as goofy as it sounds. The movie now exists in a world with autistic hacker groups and autistic assassins with memory loss.. think John Wick but dumb. While the first movie had a few splashes of comedy this one goes into the comedy deep end and it usually doesn't work. It also crawls as the movie takes a few side roads for more comedy sequences as The Accountant is lonely and trying to pick up girls now in stark contrast to the first movie.
The tonal whiplash here is about as bad as Sicaro. It's a shame because I think a movie like the original about 2 amoral characters doing the right thing but in a bad way could have been fun. Instead we get schlock and only mediocre shlock at that. Giving this one a thumbs down.
