Star: Ben Affleck

The Accountant 2 (2025) — Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal

This movie gets started with some annoying music overlaying meaningless messy violence. An irritating warm-up. But after 10 minutes it becomes more engaging, as an agency boss dies with Find The Accountant written on his arm — then we meet an aged Ben Affleck.

This movie benefits from another semi-strong key cast member in Jon Bernthal (The Punisher) playing The Accountant’s brother.

Although the Autism/Savantism trait impersonation is often accurate, it’s also often taken a bit too far / out of context in a kind of insulting way.

One key example of something they should have definitely fixed, is showing The Accountant’s walking as wobbly heavy floppy arms thing with a small reserved swagger — this is how an autistic person might walk if they are physically poorly coordinated, but when an aspie savant masters empty handed martial arts they move with a very stable head and shoulders, no swagger, like Bruce Lee did in his latest movies, or like a cat might move through hostile territory — so they got the dropped hands part right but the lack of contraction and centredness of the arms and torso is badly wrong here.

In the end, I rate this movie Bang Average. Reason being, it’s got a mix of strengths and weaknesses. Some of the concept and some of the action is great, but there’s way too much annoying drama, and most of the action is too noisy, messy and irritating — hardly good viewing.

The original was a bit better, albeit showing many of the same flaws, because it had more coolness as we got to know the main character — that movie was less full of irritating longwinded noisy messy scenes which I won’t call chaos only because chaos originally referred to something divine.

Daredevil (2003) – Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner

Daredevil (2003)

This movie has some strong action scenes as well as some entertaining non action scenes between a lot of slow & cold drama – not dissimilar to most Batman movies – a role which Ben Affleck took over in 2016.

The fight scenes have a lot of flashing light & dark to disguise the lack of real martial arts skill on display – not recommend for those suffering from epilepsy. Good music accompanies much of the action in this movie.

The first half hour is mostly boring plot-building, then the movie warms up considerably when Jennifer Garner‘s character Elektra is introduced. Note that Elektra has her own movie a couple of years later, which is just as good as Daredevil.

Supporting cast includes Michael Clarke Duncan as Kingpin – he’s a great fit for the role; Colin Farrell as Bullseye – a hired-help baddie – he also does a great job here; and Coolio who adequately plays someone wrongly accused of a crime, who Ben Affleck‘s character defends (no matter how much it costs him). Jon Favreau also does well as the main character’s partner at their own law firm.

The Accountant (2016) – Ben Affleck

Ben Affleck as The Accountant

The Accountant is a cool movie to watch for the first time, especially for anyone interested in how Asperger Syndrome (and Savant Syndrome) can affect the performance of a martial artist. Many movies have portrayed a slick, meticulously accurate assassin but few go so far as to portray such a well rounded account of autism by the lead character – this movie is like a cross between Hitman and Rain Man.

In terms of martial arts moves, there’s nothing flashy here. There’s a lot of quick-kill gun shooting and a bit of empty-handed combat of a similar nature. There’s no classical exotic moves but there is a good representation of the spirit of a ninja, you could say.

Casting wasn’t bad – there are multiple strong performances in this movie, including by Jon Bernthal (Marvel’s ‘The Punisher’) and above all the lead role by Ben Affleck.

There are times where production has shined by taking well-researched notions and strong creative ideas then doing them justice on screen, especially where traits of Higher Functioning Autism could manifest themselves in the life of a careful assassin.

The genre is a bit James Bond without the humour – it’s callous from start to finish but only faintly gritty and containing enough James Bond style features to make the movie very watchable by fans of that genre. It has a bit of a simplistic drawn-out ending which makes rewatching it less fun than it otherwise would be – perhaps the writers became complacent after a decent beginning and middle, or the producers ran out of budget to wrap things up in style, or they preferred to linger in the grittier drama genre that the movie exposed us to throughout, even though the bulk of the movie appeals to the opposite audience. There are probably certain people who love both genres, but for a fan of high budget action who steers clear of gritty drama, I would rate this movie an 8 for first-time viewing and slightly lower for rewatchings. Still, it had so much potential and such great good parts (demonstrated perfectly by the trailer) that it could have easily been rated higher with a bit more work, although that would probably have been to the dissatisfaction of gritty drama lovers – perhaps you can’t please everyone and trying to do so may have been the reason why this movie never achieved the heights it was knocking on the door for. Still, a good watch.