The Accountant 2 - Acerto de Contas

Affleck and Bernthal are in immediate harmony. Better than that, they make this strange, complicated, and honestly rather heartbreaking sibling relationship instantaneously genuine.

Even allowing for a certain level of baseline tastelessness in a contemporary Hollywood action movie, The Accountant 2 is nasty stuff.

The movie work[s] best not as an action thriller, but as a dramedy about estranged brothers figuring out how to be in each other's lives. Sadly, the genre balance tips in favor of the former.

The tonal wobbliness of The Accountant 2 is offset by all it does right.

While "The Accountant" delivered a dependable '90s-style throwback action thriller, "The Accountant 2" is much the same, though it embraces a looser, more amusing tone

While Jon Bernthal has some winning moments as the lead character's loose cannon brother, star Ben Affleck remains an odd fit as a bookish, autistic accountant who doubles as a military grade assassin, and the movie never shifts out of first gear.

"The Accountant 2" subtracts everything that worked about the 2016 original

It may not rise to the level of "Garbo Laughs," but "Affleck Dances" makes for an enticing reason to see The Accountant 2.

Affleck's action franchise flails once again with a weird mix of bloody violence and heartwarming humor.

Screenwriter Dubuque clearly enjoyed writing reams of banter for Affleck and Bernthal, though the results have a way of tossing a wrench in the film's pacing.

All that counts in "The Accountant 2" is that it's adroitly paced, unburdened by narrative logic and buoyed by its well-synced, charismatic leads.

It's absolute garbage, dreadfully written, filled with plot holes and storylines that disappear for seemingly ever, and the action sequences are generally just above The A-Team - the show, not the movie.

The sequel spends more time with the detective work, which just isn't as interesting, but the movie finds nifty little moments for character-building excursions.

For a movie about a detail obsessive, it's curiously messy. But -- and this might matter more -- the film has a reasonably firm sense of just how serious and how knowingly silly a movie about an uber-talented accountant ought to be.

When it's functioning as an action comedy, it's pretty fun, but director Gavin O'Connor pushes the narrative into some pretty dark places, climaxing with a sequence so that's so over-the-top grim it almost becomes hilarious.

Despite its reliable stream of action-movie beats, "The Accountant 2" is a tediously talky movie, as heavy on exposition as it is on explanation.

A brutal buddy film pairing Affleck's killer with his equally murderous brother, it locates the humor in its mayhem and, for it, proves a superior sequel in every respect.

Affleck does a fine job, but what makes "The Accountant 2" better than it should be is Bernthal, a roguish charmer who can talk calmly, with just a trace of menace, even though he's been responsible for a pile of bloodied corpses.

As The Accountant 2 drags out to over two hours, and its two storylines remain tonally at war with one another, it becomes increasingly clear that, two films in, this series still hasn't figured out exactly what it wants to be.

It's a little different from the first one, but who's counting?