The Accountant 2 (2025) Review

Somehow, defying all the odds, The Accountant 2 manages to be a seriously entertaining few hours.

The Accountant 2 (2025)

Director: Gavin O’Connor

Screenwriters: Bill Dubuque

Starring: Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Daniella Pineda, Robert Morgan, J. K. Simmons, Allison Robertson,

by Kieran Judge

In 2016, Ben Affleck decided to maintain his action movie run, coming right off the back of Batman vs Superman, with The Accountant, the story of Affleck’s Christian Wolff, an autistic accountant who runs numbers and finances for anyone willing to pay (often the bad guys), but uses this intel to feed the good guys (after he’s gotten his valuable works of art from the bad guys as payment). It opened to mixed reviews, a thriller with some shooting in the second half which tried to do something with its main character, but was criticised for the exact same reasons. If you hadn’t heard of the film, nobody will blame you.

However, nearly a decade later, some part of Affleck’s brain decided that he should come back to the story and have another crack at it. In this sequel, Christian Wolff is brought in by the federal finance agency after a message on a dead body asks them to find him. Soon he’s drawn into a conspiracy of money laundering, acquired savant syndrome, and saving the innocent youth of the world from the evil machinations of capitalism. He might also have to use his mercenary brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal), for backup.

Somehow, defying all the odds, The Accountant 2 manages to be a seriously entertaining few hours. When the original film was so far in the forgotten vaults of memory as to be collecting thick layers of dust even on top of the cobwebs, this is a bordering-on miraculous achievement. The creative team’s decision to turn the film towards more of an action-thriller, rather than the straight-thriller-plus-a-few-action-sequences that the first film went in for, is an inspired choice. This feels like a different team, a different franchise (if you can count two films as a franchise), following a completely different set of rules.

It takes the focus from Affleck’s character, who was the entire point of the first film, and puts more emphasis on the action film that he stars in. This could have been disastrous. Shootout films are notoriously thin in the brains department, but somehow the stars aligned and saved it from the doldrums of boredom. The Accountant 2 went all-in, including an action movie team-up for some back-and-forth snarky dialogue, which every action film needs in the modern zeitgeist. Jon Bernthal as Christopher Wolff’s brother, Brax, works as a slightly more cliched foil even than Affleck’s Wolff, but the two work effectively in a chalk and cheese fashion. In many ways it feels more like a buddy-cop film, somehow managing to keep itself entertaining without falling into the abyss of cringe.

What really puts it head and shoulders above the last film, however, is that the film decides to focus on people as symbols, of ideas and morals, instead of just ‘kill the bad guys’, which makes the narrative ten times darker and ten times more effective. It’s about children, about the callousness of individuals who see people in terms of dollar signs, and therefore the final fight is more than simply a shootout. The image of digging mass graves taps into the image of the Nazi concentration camp, and though this isn’t a film about fighting fascists, this is nevertheless imagery which taps into fears and worries of the Western world in 2025.

The film, although not about punching Nazis in the face (maybe that’s the next one), is still a fight for humanity’s moral code, for maintaining innocence and purity in the world. In much the same way that The Dark Knight had its final choice of the ship explosions as a fight for the soul of Gotham City, so this film fully – mostly - abandons any ties with Christian Wolff to negative organisations, making him a pure hero. He’s going to arm up and go to war to save the children. The true Jack Reacher-style hero that we needed.

There are still issues in that the presentation of individuals with autism isn’t great, but it does tone it down from the previous film, having it simply part of Affleck’s characterisation of Wolff rather than something to constantly point out as something strange. It’s not 100%, but it’s an improvement. Amidst all the action and darkness, heartwarming moment of dancing in a cowboy saloon bar between the two brothers just about works, and is by far the best scene of the film, a moment of purity pitched just right against the gloom. Defying all the odds, The Accountant 2 became far more human than its father, and is perhaps one of the major surprises of the 2025 Western film release calendar so far.

Rating: 7.5/10

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