There are few reasons to revisit The Accountant, the bog-standard 2016 thriller whose only distinguishing feature was the fact that Ben Affleck’s protagonist was explicitly characterised as autistic. But if you were to revisit it, surely it’d be to retool the character to better reflect the neurodivergent experience? In the first film, we’re told that when Christian Wolff (Affleck) was diagnosed, as a child, his father’s immediate response was to train both him and his brother (Jon Bernthal’s Braxton) in the Indonesian martial art of pencak silat, leading the latter to become a hitman and the former an accountant for criminals and terrorists.
It was, realistically, about as good as the autistic community could hope for from mainstream film. Christian adhered to the classic autistic savant trope; his mathematical skills boosted to the point he’s essentially a superhero while, of course, being portrayed by a neurotypical actor. Yet Bill Dubuque’s script was at least sensitive to, and occasionally realistic in, its depiction of how autism shapes Christian’s daily life and relationships, depicting him not as deliberately aloof, but as someone desperately trying to connect to a world that communicates by different means. And Affleck, to his credit, never treated the role as caricature, but as a goddamn action hero.
The Accountant 2’s response to all this tells us a lot about the state of disability representation in cinema. On the one hand, an autistic actor, Allison Robertson, has been cast in the role of Justine, Christian’s hacker aide and a non-verbal autistic woman. That specific kind of representation is incredibly rare. On the other hand, her character is the head of what can only be described as “Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Autistics”, an X-Men-style academy in which a child army sits at computer keyboards and hacks drones and web cameras purely for Christian’s benefit. This time around, no one in the film can actually bring themselves to say the word “autistic”. Christian alludes to “my condition”, “my people”, etc etc.
It’s a patently ridiculous element of a sequel whose only move is to amp up everything that was ridiculous about its predecessor. And maybe it’d all be easier to laugh off if the US health secretary hadn’t just called autism an “epidemic” in need of elimination. But while the near-decade delay in The Accountant 2’s release comes with a variety of excuses (Covid, strikes, regime changes at Warner Bros), the bigger crisis at the heart of the film is its inability to justify why we should have come back here in the first place.
Returning writer-director team Dubuque and Gavin O’Connor have refitted their goofy-but-serious first film to become a violent, knockabout buddy comedy, bringing back Bernthal’s Braxton and rewriting his character so he’s now nothing but a human peacock. He struts around his hotel room in his underwear, hollering down the phone about a corgi puppy; he monologues about The Wizard of Oz while eating ice cream in front of a woman he’s holding hostage.
He’s now, for narrative convenience, a cocksure opposite to Christian’s methodical introvert. Out on the trail of a missing immigrant family, the brothers smash heads, fire guns, and bicker their way through a vague and insensitively handled plot line about cartel-backed human traffickers. Christian, at one point, goes to a speed dating event. At another, he does some line dancing. It’s teetering right on the edge of seeing his autism as nothing more than a punchline. After nearly 10 years, can anyone really call The Accountant 2 progress?
Dir: Gavin O'Connor. Starring: Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Daniella Pineda, JK Simmons. Cert 15, 132 minutes.
‘The Accountant 2’ is in cinemas from 25 April
