SXSW film festival: There’s more ludicrous plotting and macho action in Amazon’s decent enough fan service follow-up

Ben Affleck may have given up Batman, but he’s not done with superheroes. In the 2016 film The Accountant, Affleck played Christian Wolff, one of many aliases for an autistic mathematical savant who worked as a forensic accountant and money launderer for every stripe of black money organization. A plethora of confusing and/or outright sad flashbacks served as his superhero origin story: a cold military PsyOps father trained Chris, bullied for his difference and struggling with tantrums, and his neurotypical brother to become lethal fighting machines. The film, written by Bill Dubuque (co-creator of Netflix’s Ozark), treated Chris’s neurodivergence as a superpower, the key to exceptional skill in all fields – a noble intention, though one squandered by the misanthropic stupidity of everything around it.

In practice, Chris was a pretty standard-issue movie assassin,...