The Accountant 2

This is one of those sequels that didn't need to happen -- one that'll forever dangle vestigially off its predecessor -- one that'll go down in history as a mindless milking of a piece that didn't ask to be milked -- an udder moolestation (thanks ChatGPT). This is so typical for sequels, I know it is, but I'm not usually involved with such material, so it's still kind of confounding for me. Through my family I'm involved with this franchise, though, so I'm confronted with this mainstream conundrum of a parasitic appendix for the first time in a while.

Not only did it not need to happen, it apparently didn't know how to make it happen. It focused on the wrong things, such that it feels less like a sequel and more like there was a completely separate screenplay that wasn't deemed good enough to stand alone, so we subbed in the superficialities of The Accountant to gain that base audience. "This screenplay isn't terrible, but it won't make money, so how about we make it look like a sequel to The Accountant? Shouldn't take too much rewriting, and we'll instantly tap that whole fanbase, particularly the Bien's, who make up most of our views." It resembles its predecessor basically just in superficial characters and being a standard action movie.

The first installation at least tried to say something about autism, brothers, accounting... this one doesn't. It's just an action movie. Christian doesn't do any accounting, nor is his autism displayed in any kind of natural way. Not knowing much about autism myself, I would guess that community would decry this movie's inconsistent portrayal. Maybe I'm wrong and it got the autism right, I just doubt it based on its juvenile handling of other elements.

Some of the pacing was weirdly misguided. There were extended frivolous sequences, like the blind dating and the line dancing, that seemed intended to build character, but came off instead like those deleted scenes you occasionally encounter that you can't believe they even considered including in the movie... only in this case, not only were they considered, they were included. One problem here is the writers leaned too heavily and overtly on humor. If you're going to stall the action so long, it'd better really build character or really be funny.