Action [Rain] Man Returns.

It’s said that nothing is certain but death and taxes, and by happy coincidence both those things happen to be the stock in trade of shadowy underworld figure The Accountant, a case of nominative hiding-in-plain-sight so on point it makes you wonder if Pete Waterman had a sideline in contract killing while touring naff nineties nightclubs with Michaela Strachan during his Hitman And Her years. But while The Accountant 2 files a more than respectable number of killings, fans of neurodivergent forensic accountancy will find a lot of red in its ledger as Christian Wolff makes a bid for the mainstream.

When Ray King (J K Simmons), the semi-retired former Treasury Director is murdered during a meeting with the mysterious Anaïs (Daniella Pineda), a cryptic message written on his arm to “Find The Accountant” sets Deputy Director Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) on a collision course with Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), America’s premiere mob money launderer/ mob boss murderer, which must be a tricky customer proposition to market. Their joint investigation quickly leads them into the murky world of people trafficking although their methodologies quickly put the uneasy allies at odds, a situation only exacerbated by Christian’s recruitment of his brother Braxon (John Bernthal).

Although The Accountant 2 has less weird, quirky narrative turns than the original it doesn’t mean it’s jettisoned all its idiosyncrasies in a quest for a bigger slice of the action movie franchise audience. Wolff’s Harbor Neuroscience-based assistant Justine (Allison Robertson) is elevated to become the outright ‘Guy In The Chair’, replete with a team of institutionalised savant hackers who are deployed like additional server power as and when required. Completely absent are the moments of helping the “little guys” like some kind of balance sheet Equalizer, lost in favour of big-swing avenging. Likewise, the romantic sidekick angle is swapped out (there’s no mention nor acknowledgement of Anna Kendrick’s character from the first film) in favour of a buddy-movie structure that sees Jon Bernthal embrace a much larger role – and, seemingly, finally release all of his pent-up performance moments from The Amateur – and the romantic subtext replaced by hesitant fraternal reconciliation, a pairing that proves to be this unexpectedly superior sequel’s ace in the hole.

Ben Affleck’s naturally muted emotional range and his underlying air of discomfort in his own skin lend him an advantage in this role but where his performance in the first Accountant movie frequently felt tokenistic and superficial, here it appears he’s actually put in a bit of effort, by which I mean he’s definitely done more than binge watched at least one or two seasons of The Good Doctor and maybe skim through some YouTube clips of Rain Man. While it might not always feel authentic, it does feel heartfelt and not some kind of neurological cosplay. It’s all the more effective because he has Bernthal to bounce off and Bernthal’s constantly doing tremendous work, channelling the complexities of his character’s chequered and traumatic history, the multifaceted impact of growing up with a sibling with additional needs and the comfortingly resilient yet careworn blanket of genuine brotherly affection. There’s a beautiful, small moment – I think it’s in the trailer actually – involving a bottle of sunblock that positively shines with sibling authenticity. If, in the film’s occasional quiet moments, the pair evoke a sense of genuine brotherhood, when it gets down to business Affleck and Bernthal spark off each other like morally ambiguous versions of Holmes and Watson, if Watson had breathtaking rage issues and Holmes’ preferred method of elementary deduction frequently culminated with a .50 calibre sniper rifle.

It’s the chaotic camaraderie that carries the film through its unwieldy, overcomplicated, and not altogether successfully articulated plot. A rival neurodivergent assassin – this time from the even rarer acquired savant syndrome – storyline parallels and crosses-over with but never quite meshes with the main lines of enquiry and there are a couple of leaps of deduction (an in-need-of-rescue child’s autism is remotely diagnosed via a photograph) that threaten to but never quite derail proceedings. The finale is a jumbled mess of tone-deaf American heroes as saviours shoot-out that’s so generic it quickly becomes boring, like a deleted scene from Sicario and raises queasily unanswered questions about just what would happen to a group of Mexican children and orphans rescued from a people trafficking operation in Mexico and brought back to the USA nowadays? Perhaps there’s a deleted post-credit scene where they’re welcomed with open arms then immediately ushered on to the next flight to El Salvador?

As a whole, though, The Accountant 2 is a surprisingly effective sequel, an action buddy-movie that works better as a character study than a kinetic shoot-‘em-up and unobtrusively sets the scene for the franchise to evolve – if it chooses to – into a neurologically inclusive expanded world akin to the John Wick series. Let’s just hope the no doubt inevitable threequel will allow Christian to cover a glass partition with sharpied subledgers again, or at least wield a Schedule K-1 as often as he whips out his AR-15.