There are lots of media representations about attorneys: movies, TV shows, books, and plays. However, there hasn’t been too many about accountants, maybe just one film named The Producers about a timid accountant and a failing Broadway producer who scheme to get rich by overselling shares.
Given this under-representation in media and popular culture, it’s easy to understand why some segments of the movie-viewing audience have been looking forward to the release of The Accountant 2. After waiting a mere nine years, Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) returns with his signature bland affect, mental super-powers, devastating martial arts ability, and lots of weaponry. There are also enough subtle puns and inside jokes to make you feel like the film’s director Gavin O’Connor may be toying with the audience, like references to 17th and 18th century mathematicians, Star Wars and the New York Yankees.
For two hours we follow Christian, the solidly on-the-neurodiversity spectrum accountant, as he makes superficial attempts to meet the expectations of normal society. Despite these admirable intentions, including his laughable adventures in speed dating and his giving tax advice about the benefits of the Married Filing Jointly election, Christian gets drawn into the dark world of money laundering and human trafficking. The conflict begins when the Director of FINCEN Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) asks him to investigate and avenge the death of the FBI agent Raymond King (J. K. Simmons), who was the closest thing to a normal friend Christian had.
Providing continuity from the first film, Jon Berntal returns as Braxton, Christian’s high-end killer-for-hire brother. The ongoing interaction between the brothers provides the film’s filler between fistfights and shootouts. The two clearly have a rocky history; they haven’t spoken in eight years. However, the brother’s role in the movie is tangential, with little impact on the movie’s main character arcs.
What is notable, however, is Christian’s innate ability to see patterns and anomalies in data, and to piece together fact patterns from seemingly unrelated documents. After Raymond is murdered, Marybeth tries to reconstruct the case he was working on from a file of random pizza menus, a couple of tax returns, a years-old photograph of an immigrant family, and other ephemera. The morning after she shows the file to Christian, he has reconstructed the timeline of events and has identified the business most likely to be responsible for Raymond’s death. This is where the investigative fieldwork begins.
The two go to the suspect business, a pizza company, under the pretext of a FINCEN investigation. Despite the owner’s typical claim that he “runs a clean business,” Christian rattles off numbers for the company’s tax returns and quickly deduces that the income claimed would require sales far in excess of the amount of packaging required, and the owner is therefore laundering dirty money.
This brings us to my favorite scene of the film: the field interview. Christian quickly transitions that conversation from information-gathering to admission-seeking, using unorthodox techniques like dislocating the business-owner’s shoulder and sending three of his bodyguards to the hospital. I must have missed that part of audit training.
This was the movie’s real break-out scene where Christian uses his savant skills to “crack the case” and then steps way out of bounds by using force. It could serve as a vicarious fantasy of many auditors who have that one accounts payable clerk at a client who is an unending source of grief. Interview trainings in audit and at the FBI are nothing compared to how Christian Wolff does it.
This sets up the ongoing tension between Marybeth’s by-the-book law enforcement approach and Christian being oblivious to social, and sometimes legal, conventions. At one point she diminishes his knowledge and background, saying he is a “mob accountant, working for money launderers and warlords.” Given the circumstances, those sound like solid qualifications for the job at hand.
Unlike Christian’s Airstream trailer, the film goes down various seemingly misleading paths. These include an avenging assassin, an autistic 13-year-old boy in a prison compound in Mexico, and Christian’s handler, a woman with a synthesized voice (nice British accent) who manages a data extraction and surveillance team of neurodiverse teenagers in a secret high-tech hideout disguised as a school for “alternatively gifted” students in bucolic New England.
Nevertheless, director O’Connor brings the various threads together to bring us to a reasonably satisfying conclusion and sets the stage for The Accountant 3. Hopefully there will be more auditing jokes next time.
David S. Zweighaft, CPA, CFF, CFE, is a partner with RSZ Forensic Associates, a New York City-based forensic accounting and litigation consulting firm. In 2025, Forbes named him one of the Best CPAs in New York State.