A week or two after a sneaky rewatch of The Accountant (2016) which proved unnecessary; there is no essential continuity with the first one. Once again directed by Gavin O'Connor from a script by Bill Dubuque. Once again Ben Affleck plays a man with autism who has the movie-trope mental gifts as well as being bulletproof and ultraviolent. There's no kink this time; it's a strictly linear buddy flick with Jon Bernthal once again playing the normie/less lethal/more vulnerable buddy-brother.
The opening scene has Affleck attending a dating meetup that he's hacked, and like most of the other comic relief it does not land. There's an extended sequence where Affleck's people (the children at this universe's equivalent of the X Mansion) engage in Bladerunner-ish enhancement of surveillance images that suggest the USA has cameras everywhere now, just like the U.K., but Hollywood has yet to move on from the Sneakers (1992) (etc) conception of or consistency in what computers can do.
After all the necessary buildup, where the law is found to be inadequately effectual (just like Dirty Harry did in 1971), things get Rambo-esque (or perhaps just generically action-McJackson) over some human trafficking from Mexico; the last 30 minutes is almost pure video game violence. Yes, having American men saving Latin American children with machine guns is served up straight. Alongside this we see Daniella Pineda discharge a few contracts (evoking the ultra capable femme of Logan (2017)). J.K. Simmons reprises his earlier role as an investigator and Cynthia Addai-Robinson is again the G-woman-in-distress, much like Emily Blunt in Sicario (2016/2018). There's very little to recommend it.
Manohla Dargis: don't think too hard, it works! Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: two circumspect stars.
