BEFORE: It's a recovery day - sleep late, have a couple sandwiches, maybe watch the Emmy Awards broadcast even though I saw plenty of spoilers, but I can probably speed through the whole thing in an hour if I fast-forward through all the speeches and the nonsense. Age-wise I'm at the point where if I have a lot of physical activity, you know, like work, then I have to take a day off after working two, and during that day my legs need to be elevated most of the time - sitting in a chair will wear out my legs faster than standing will, and I realize that's not good. But it's kind of why I gave up my desk job, to try and get some circulation back in the lower limbs, 30 years of sitting at a desk five days a week did some damage, and the old spare tire around the waist probably didn't help. But I've seen what happens to me in 20 years by looking at my parents, so I know someday I won't be ambulatory at all, if I live that long. C'est la vie - sure, I could change my habits but where's the fun in that? Kidding, sort of.
J.K. Simmons carries over from "The Union". I should probably re-read my review of "The Accountant" from a few years ago, or perhaps I'll just dive right in.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Accountant" (Movie #2,775)
THE PLOT: Christian Wolff applies his brilliant mind and illegal methods to reconstruct the unsolved puzzle of a Treasury chief's murder.
AFTER: Right, I remember now, the Accountant character is kind of special-needs, or neuro-divergent, or somewhere on the spectrum. Not autistic per se, but there was some kind of childhood trauma mentioned in the first film, and/or the fact that his father wasn't very accepting of his son's condition, so instead of comforting him or telling him he was loved, his father chose to train him on all martial arts and modern artillery as some kind of male-bonding exercise. I guess maybe he figured if his son had no social skills, the best place for him would be in the military? That doesn't really follow. So I guess that's how you end up with a lead character who's a bizarre mix of Batman and Rain Man.
Christian Wolff (not his real name, just one of countless aliases he uses) is also an expert in forensic accounting, computer coding, and art collection - in the last film he had a trailer full of priceless artworks that he accepted as payment instead of money. Oh, and he apparently has no moral compass because he'll work for the mob or a foreign country that is America's enemy, as long as they pay him. But in the sequel we find out what he's been doing with all his money, not just investing it, but also funding a brain hospital and research center called Harbor Neuroscience, which helps teens with their afflictions and then puts them to work doing research for the Accountant. They scan through hours of surveillance camera footage, they do his hacking, and the Man in the Chair here is Justine, a woman who leads the team of brilliant teens that have similar neuro-divergences to his own, and she speaks through a computer. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong there? He could probably just use ChatGPT and get similar results.
This film opens with scenes of Raymond King, former director of FinCen, trying to track down a missing family of immigrants from El Salvador, he contacts a mysterious female assassin for help, but she refuses. However, she warns Ray that he's been followed and before long he's in a barfight after armed men show up to kill him. The Accountant must have taught Ray these cool tricks about how to use the room you're in as a weapon, or grab an enemy's gun hand and use it to kill that guy's partner. Hey, J.K. Simmons is in GREAT shape for a guy his age, so I guess then his character is, too - he kills all the guys who attacked him in the bar, but then gets shot when he runs out into the street. But he carved a message in his arm first, which reads "Find the Accountant".
Marybeth Medina, he woman who took Ray's old job (and became the Accountant's new contact in the first film) is called to I.D. the body, and she sees the arm note. She manages to get word to the Accountant that she needs help, as now there are two mysteries to solve, where is that immigrant family, and who killed Ray? She sets up one of those big "murder board" walls of photos with pushpins and string connecting the things that might be connected, and then the Accountant gets to work thinking. He manages to figure out where the family must have crossed the border in order to end up in Los Angeles.
Christian contacts his brother, Braxton, who he hasn't seen since the first film, and they start working their way up the chain of illegal immigration in L.A., starting with a pizza restaurant and factory that Christian immediately determines is laundering money because their records show they sold WAY more large pizzas then the number of pizza boxes they ordered. So they're getting a payoff, in addition to hiring immigrants to make pizzas. Braxton is a mercenary and assassin, so they're both not above using torture to get answers, but Marybeth decides she can't work that way, so their partnership is dissolved. But they continue working the case, just from different angles. Marybeth checks out a hospital where she thinks the missing immigrant mother may have been taken after a car accident, only to find that her brain was so damaged that it basically rewired itself, suddenly she could play master-level chess and she had intense combat skills, the doctor calls it acquired savant syndrome, where she has no memory of who she was before, but suddenly can do all these new things as a trade off.
Savant syndrome is a real thing, and it may also be the condition that the Accountant has. Savants tend to excel in one domain, such as mathematics or art, but also have weak social skills, or be impaired in other ways, such as autism or a brain injury, so according to Wiki at least, the events of this film may be possible. Extremely unlikely, like one in a million people, but possible.
Meanwhile, Braxton's handler tries to hire him to kill Marybeth, but he refuses the job. Later Christian sees the message on his brother's phone and realizes that Marybeth's life is in danger, and if his brother turned down the job, someone else might have been hired to kill her. So he speeds to her house on a motorcycle, and finds her engaged in a fight with that same mystery woman that Ray King talked to in the bar, so hmm, what's going on there?
Also meanwhile, Christian and Braxton use the neuro-divergent think tank (and a few drones) to locate the prison in Juarez where they think the boy from the photo is being held. They drive the Airstream to Mexico JUST in time to arrive on the day where the prison guards are digging a mass grave and are about to kill all the kids. NITPICK POINT: Come on, they've had these kids locked up for months, if the kids had no value as ransomed hostages, why didn't they kill them a long time ago. No, that's the day, like the evil immigrant prison employees picked a date on the calendar a month in advance, you know, because they needed time to plan. Give me a break.
Anyway, the brothers shoot up the prison and save the kids, especially the one they were looking for, who's bound to qualify for a job working at Harbor Neuroscience as another autistic kid with a dream. Look, it's a stretch, sure, not only that the Accountant was able to figure out all this stuff, but that he and his brother put aside their differences, enacted a plan to fix everything and kill all the bad men, and then followed through. But if you just want to think about this as if it's as close as we're ever going to get to a Batman & Punisher team-up movie, you know, I'm fine with that, too.
Directed by Gavin O'Connor (director of "The Way Back" and "Warrior")
Also starring Ben Affleck (last seen in "Gigli"), Jon Bernthal (last seen in "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl"), Cynthia Addai-Robinson (last seen in "The People We Hate at the Wedding"), Allison Robertson, Alison Wright (last seen in "The Accountant"), Daniella Pineda (last seen in "Plane"), Robert Morgan (last seen in "Babylon"), Grant Harvey (last seen in "Save the Date"), Andrew Howard (last seen in "True Memoirs of an International Assassin"), Yael Ocasio (last seen in "Reptile"), Lombardo Boyar (last seen in "Endings, Beginnings"), Michael Tourek (last seen in "Citizen Ruth"), Fernando Chien (last seen in "Sun Dogs"), Abner Lozano, Talia Thiesfield, Presley Alexander, Nik Sanchez, Corwin Ireland, Avery Taylor, Vincent Juskalian, John Patrick Jordan (last seen in "Mank"), Kristen Ariza, Jeremy Radin (last seen in "The Way Back"), Betsy Baker (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Alan Barinholtz (last seen in "The Oath"), Alberto Manquero, Todd Stashwick (last seen in "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters"), Cassandra Blair, Megan Grano (last seen in "Bombshell"), Catherine Adell, Liesel Kopp, Monica Bhatnagar, Alain Ali Washnevsky, Matt Linton, Joe Holt (last seen in "Far from Heaven"), Erica Johnson, Dominique Domingo, Charlie Bodin, Paula Rhodes (last seen in "To Leslie"), Robert Keith, Heidi Amundson, Beatrice Naomi Nathanson, Ramon Cortes,
RATING: 5 out of 10 Bingo balls
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