Yes, folks, it’s time for another double feature. This time, it’s two action thrillers centered around unlikely protagonists. And Jon Bernthal is in both of them, funny enough.
The Amateur has been in development since all the way back in 2006, when Hugh Jackman was set to star. One assumes Disney dredged up the rights from the 20th Century vaults after they bought Fox, and the project eventually got up and running with Rami Malek starring and exec producing. The story for The Accountant 2 is even more improbable.
The Accountant came out in 2016 to middling critical reviews, and went without any cultural staying power. The film grossed $155 million worldwide against a reported $44 million budget in a crappy release window. Why anybody bothered to spend twice that budget and nine years in the process of making a sequel, nobody seemed to know.
But then the trailers came out and made an intriguing argument. See, the first movie established that Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal were playing two brothers who were both stone-cold cutthroat badasses. But they barely shared the screen together. We never even learned that they were related until the last few minutes. Don’t you want a movie in which Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal get to act opposite each other while gunning down armies of bad guys?
…Well, yeah, that does sound awesome. And it would’ve been, if it wasn’t attached to this particular franchise. (Yeah, this is a franchise now, gods help us.)
I won’t bother trying to recap the plot or premise of The Accountant 2, as it’s a convoluted mess that couldn’t be sufficiently unraveled without significant spoilers. Put simply, 1. an enforcement director at the Treasury Department (J.K. Simmons) gets murdered, 2. his protege (Marybeth Medina, played by Cynthia Addai-Robinson) wants to solve the murder, which leads her to 3. solicit help from Christian Wolff (Affleck), who in turn 4. brings in his little brother Braxton (Bernthal) for backup, and 5. we’re off to the races.
That’s where we begin. By the end, our two plot-armored heroes are blowing up Juarez, gunning down an army of nameless brown-skinned child traffickers. Yeah. It’s a movie in which the only solution to a very real and very evil crime is to let a couple of invincible white guys kill everyone involved without any kind of oversight or accountability. This is freaking David Ayer morality right here.
By contrast, the premise to The Amateur is more engaging and more straightforward (by the complex standards of an espionage thriller, anyway). Malik plays Charlie Heller, a hotshot CIA analyst who loses his wife (Sarah, played by Rachel Brosnahan) to a terrorist attack in London. Pissed off and unsatisfied with the CIA’s efforts at tracking down her killers, Charlie wants to go overseas and enact his own brand of justice.
Trouble is, Charlie isn’t trained as a field agent. He can barely even fire a gun. But when it comes to hacking, surveillance, coding, electronics, and all things engineering, he’s a goddamn genius. So here’s a protagonist with genuine vulnerability and pathos, without any of the “action star” sheen on Ben Affleck, and that’s definitely an upgrade here.
Long story short, Charlie blackmails his CIA bosses into getting him a some fake passports and a crash course in field training. But then the blackmail attempt against CIA operatives inevitably goes south, so now Charlie is on the run from his worthy peers in the CIA while he’s also running all over the world chasing down his wife’s killers.
I will say this much for The Accountant 2: Its action scenes are serviceably mediocre, which is still a step up from The Amateur. Heller’s whole deal is that he’s no good at martial arts and he’s worthless with a gun, so it’s great fun to watch him outsmart the CIA while devising new inventive death traps for the antagonists. The unfortunate downside is that on those few occasions when we do get a fistfight or a gunfight, it’s shot, choreographed, and edited like shit. By contrast, The Accountant 2 doesn’t deliver anything new or exciting in terms of action, but at least it’s coherent.
As with the first movie, my other big problem with The Accountant 2 is with the autism angle. The whole gimmick of this franchise is that Christian is supposed to be autistic, but the filmmakers don’t have a clue how to portray that in any kind of authentic or sympathetic way. It certainly doesn’t help that this is an action movie predicated on Christian being an invulnerable action star and a mathematical prodigy — bringing that kind of inner turmoil to an ubermensch is a terrible fit.
It was proven in the first movie, and continued in the sequel, that Ben Affleck cannot play autism. It’s not a card in his deck. This problem is even more apparent in a conversation with Christian’s brother, going back and forth about what it’s like growing up with an autistic member of the family, and it falls flat on the floor because neither one of these men has any idea what they’re talking about. Sure, Affleck and Bernthal have enough chemistry that they could power a movie together, but not this one. Not with these characters. And there’s nobody else in the cast worth mentioning.
By contrast, Rami Malek is the guy who killed James Bond before Jeff Bezos could try it. He is more than capable of playing a super-genius who could run rings around everyone without firing off a single shot, and he’s got the chops to sell the character’s pathos as well.
We’ve also got Laurence Fishburne and Jon Bernthal capably playing the wild cards, though I’m disappointed Bernthal didn’t get more screen time. Michael Stuhlbarg doesn’t show up until the climax, but he freaking powers the climax. Rachel Brosnahan is only really there to be a motivation for the protagonist, which sucks, but she certainly turned in a fine dry run for Lois Lane.
It’s important to note that at its heart and core, The Amateur is a revenge thriller. This naturally means that somebody (usually the main love interest) has to get fridged, that’s an unfortunate keystone of any film in the genre. More importantly — unlike the Wolff Brothers getting framed as the heroes despite their flagrantly immoral actions — there are no good guys in a revenge thriller. A central tenet of any revenge thriller is that anyone seeking vengeance has to dig their own grave in the process. This dovetails neatly with the general question of why and when violence is necessary, which works on a personal level regarding Heller’s vendetta and on a macro level regarding national security.
Too bad the filmmakers chickened out and gave the film a happy ending. Cowards.
Compare that to the tonal and thematic disconnect in The Accountant 2, which is most obvious during two particular scenes. The first comes early, in which Christian cracks a speed-dating algorithm to try and get better results at a speed-dating event and strikes out anyway. The second comes at a country bar in which Christian figures out the patterns involved in line dancing and uses this analysis to land a woman’s phone number.
These scenes have nothing whatever to do with the plot. Because they can’t. Because they don’t belong anywhere near an action thriller.
But then we get that scene. The big one. The one that sends this whole movie — quite possibly this whole mediocre series — over the shark.
To put this as briefly as I can, I’m referring to the scene in which Christian calls upon his tech-savvy sidekick (Justine, with Allison Robertson taking the role from Alison Wright) to track down a particular person of interest. In turn, Justine employs a platoon of autistic children to engage in a hacking operation that ends in these kids rifling through some random person’s personal photos on her phone. All while a federal agent (Medina, namely) looks on helplessly and cries for all this illegal and immoral shit to stop. Even as we know perfectly well this plot-vital information will be obtained and used anyway despite all Medina’s impotent rage.
In other words, this is a fight of Bad versus Evil, in which Good is naive and useless. Like I said earlier, this is shit right out of the David Ayer manual. It’s a vigilante superhero fantasy in which an invincible hero instantly resolves an unambiguous evil. Except in this case, the white man’s superpowers are autism and shooting an army of brown people without any harm or repercussions.
It’s like the filmmakers for The Accountant 2 found the perfect recipe for a movie specifically built to piss me off. I don’t know what I ever did to Gavin O’Connor, but fuck him right back.
The Accountant 2 fails to make the case for why it exists, why the previous film exists, and why a third movie should exist. It’s mediocre and unmemorable at best, outright wrong-headed and insulting at worst. No way can I recommend this when even the worst 87North production is more fun and less offensive.
On the other hand, The Amateur has much more to offer. Now that the Bourne franchise has finally gone dormant and the Mission: Impossible franchise is on its way out, there was a clear vacancy in the lane of espionage cat-and-mouse thrillers about a lone protagonist quick and resourceful enough to outmaneuver the full force of the CIA. The direct action is bland, but watching the lead character MacGyver some new last-minute plan was consistently entertaining and the cast is far stronger.
I’m happy to recommend the smarter and more inventive film. The Accountant 2 can safely be ignored, but definitely give The Amateur a look.