‘The Accountant 2’ Review: Ben Affleck’s Autistic Action Savant Makes a Winning Return in a Thriller That Improves on the First Film’s Messiness

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In 1984, “The Terminator” became one of the pop-culture touchstones of its decade, though it’s hard to remember that when Arnold Schwarzenegger was first tapped to play that glowering cybernetic killer, the casting was a bit of knowing joke, one that spun off Arnold’s borderline comic lunkishness as an actor. (It’s not a compliment, exactly, to say that you were born to play a cyborg.) Ben Affleck is a far better actor than Schwarzenegger, but nine years ago, when Affleck was cast as the title character of “The Accountant,” the role carried some of that same frisson of meta japery.

For Affleck, winning as he can be, often has a blockish, overly square, slightly inexpressive quality. And it’s precisely that aspect of his persona that makes him so perfect as Christian Wolff, an autistic savant who works as an accountant for mobsters and terrorists, using his surreal numbers acumen to clean up their fraudulent books.

He is also, not so incidentally, a brutally efficient action bruiser. You could say, in the broadest sense, that “The Accountant” was a “Jason Bourne” thriller with Rain Man at its center.

But that wouldn’t do justice to the submerged wit of Affleck’s performance — or to the even better one he gives in “The Accountant 2,” which premiered tonight at SXSW.