The Accountant 2

I went to see The Accountant on a whim and was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it so I was really looking forward to the sequel.  I had the chance to see a Thursday preview of The Accountant 2 last night with my nephew and, unfortunately, I found it a bit underwhelming.  Raymond King (J.K. Simmons), a retired Treasury Agent now working as a private investigator, meets with a mysterious woman named Anaïs (Danielle Pineda) in the course of his search for a family of three from El Salvador who went missing while crossing the border into the U.S.  During their meeting, King is ambushed by assassins but manages to write a message to find the accountant on his arm before he is killed.  King's former colleague at the Treasury Department, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), sees the message and reaches out to Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) through his handler Justine (Allison Robertson) at Harbor Neuroscience.  Medina and Wolff begin working together to solve King's murder but eventually unravel a vast human trafficking organization run by Burke (Robert Morgan) and they recruit Wolff's estranged brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) to help find Anaïs and the missing family.  The central mystery is very convoluted and there were many times when I had no idea who a character was or how they were involved in the story (and after a while I didn't really care who was who).  I was also disappointed by how much Wolff relies on his cadre of students at Harbor Neuroscience and their hacking skills rather than his own extraordinary abilities to solve the puzzle (which is what I liked about the first movie).  There are some fun action sequences but, in my opinion, the culminating gunfight in a detention camp in Mexico is tedious because it is incredibly far-fetched, to the point of incredulity, and it goes on way too long.  I did really like the dynamic between Affleck and Bernthal as brothers who each have their own way of finding information in some hilarious scenes and as brothers who are trying to forge a relationship with each other despite these differences in some touching ones.  This was a mixed bag for me and I suspect people who are fans of buddy comedies or action movies will like it but fans of the first movie might not.