A Bunch Of Thoughts About The Trailer For The Accountant 2

ALSO: Doctor Odyssey is fighting sharks and True Detective is headed to the Big Apple

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: We are back, baby

A few notes:

— This is the trailer for the sequel to The Accountant, a movie that came out almost a decade ago to moderate at best excitement and then proceeded to achieve ridiculous levels of success on basic cable and streaming. I know because I have seen all or part of it something like 45 times over the years. It is outrageously watchable, in both the way where you actually pay attention to it and the way where you kind of have it on in the room at 3pm on a rainy Saturday while you do laundry. That is an incredible feat for any movie but especially for a movie where Ben Affleck plays a math genius assassin who is on the autism spectrum and has to bring down a corrupt company led by John Lithgow and Jean Smart. Anna Kendrick is in there, too. So are JK Simmons and Jon Bernthal. Simmons’ character does that thing where he reveals many years of backstory through a single monologue at the end of the second act. There is a full-on accounting montage dead in the middle of the movie. I shouted when I saw it. Look.

— Vanity Fair did a blog about the road to making the sequel that touches on some of this so let’s go ahead and blockquote a useful paragraph and move on.

When it was released, The Accountant was a modest hit (the $44 million film earned $155 million worldwide), but Affleck says it has become an audience favorite. “It was a movie that I found that I would hear about from people,” he says. “It was a movie that stuck around, that people would talk about and say, ‘Oh, hey, I like The Accountant.’ And there seemed to be a lot of goodwill towards it.”

Correct.

— The trailer for the sequel brings back some if not all of the cast from the first one. Affleck and Bernthal are back and this one seems to focus a lot on their brotherly dynamic. Cynthia Addai-Robinson is back as an FBI agent. JK Simmons is back aaaaaaand whoops he’s dead in the morgue with this written on his arm.

— They do, in fact, find the accountant. He’s been on the run since the events of the first movie, which is understandable because he really did kill a lot of people. But it brings us to a concerning point…

— There is very little accounting in this trailer. None, really. A big part of the charm of the first one was watching the character live those two lives and seeing them meld together as the books revealed the corruption. This looks like more of… I don’t know. Just a movie where they find him to go kill bad guys? Which is fine. A character coming out of retirement to go on a spree of revenge is always fun. But I’m going to need to see my guy crunch some numbers. I need to see him at a whiteboard with a stack of spreadsheets. I do not care why or how it happens. Just do it.

— Speaking of concerns, I was a little bummed that this movie was just called The Accountant 2 instead of something sillier that involved a colon and an accounting term. Something like…

The Accountant: Standard Deductions

The Accountant: First In, First Out

The Accountant: Red Ink

… or whatever. But then, as the trailer was ending, I saw this happen…

… and I was back in. I never should have doubted them.

The movie comes out on April 25. I am kind of furious with this release strategy. They should have dropped it on streaming right on April 15 so people could watch it as intended: in their living room as they’re getting their tax paperwork together at the very last minute, packing envelopes in a panic and periodically looking up to see Affleck storm an office building.

I still can’t believe this is really happening. What a world.

FOUR: The next season of True Detective is already coming together