The Accountant 2 (Gavin O’Connor, 2025) & Black Dog (Guang Hu, 2024)

Happy Easter Monday, everyone: I’ve got two reviews for you today - The movies may be very different, but both are totally worth it. First up, it’s the sequel to The Accountant, with Ben Affleck and Gavin O’Connor. Then it’s the Chinese movie Black Dog, which won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes last year. From action to arthouse, here we go…

The chemistry is real: both Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal shine in The Accountant 2, the satisfying sequel the original action thriller from 2016.

In that movie, like this new one written by Bill Dubuque and directed by Gavin O’Connor, Ben Affleck played Christian Wolff, a math savant with killer instinct, raised by a military father to combine brains with brawn.

Wolff worked for some very bad people, but he had his reasons, getting paid in art and/or giving large donations to the Harbor Neuroscience treatment center.

Eventually, his cover was blown while trying to save accounting clerk Dana (Anna Kendrick), even though he still managed to gain the respect of Ray King (J.K. Simmons), the chief of the Treasury Department’s Crime Enforcement Division, and his deputy Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson).

Over the course of the film he also re-connected with his younger brother Brax (Jon Bernthal), who made a living as an assassin for hire.

Most of these characters reappear in this second installment, which takes place nine years after the events in the original.

The opening belongs to J.K. Simmons, whose Ray King has a meeting in a bar at night with the mysterious Anaïs (Daniella Pineda, excellent), which doesn’t go very well and ends with a simple message: find the accountant.

So it’s up to Marybeth Medina to find Christian, who in turn takes it upon himself to find out what happened during that fateful night and, more importantly, why.

The plot of the movie is both ingenious and a lot of fun, while also taking a look at the plight of Mexican immigrants in the United States, so I’m going to spoil as little as possible.

The absence of Anna Kendrick (whose arc was basically finished at the end of the first movie) is compensated for by a much larger role for the great Jon Bernthal as brother Brax.

As underused as he was in The Amateur - which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago - I’m happy to report that director O’Connor and star Affleck give him (once he makes his entrance at the 45 minutes mark) every chance to shine.

Bernthal, an ideal mix of character actor and action star, attacks the role with relish and a vengeance, while Affleck once again leans into his natural stiffness to emphasize Christian’s neuro divergence and make him feel even more believable than in the first movie.

The chemistry between the two actors is real. Chris and Brax share quips, trade insults and raise both heaven and hell together, and do some real acting while they are at it.

The Accountant 2 is by turns a buddy comedy, a hangout movie and, of course, an action thriller.

And even if it becomes a more regular ‘shoot ‘em up and kill all the bad guys’ movie in the last half hour, it’s still a remarkably assured one, that now makes me actively look forward to The Accountant 3.

I give it a 7 1/2 out of 10!

Note: The Accountant 2 is released this coming week in most parts of the world.

BLACK DOG (Guang Hu, 2024)

Last year the Chinese movie Black Dog won the Jury Prize of Un Certain Regard, the second competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Set at the edge of the Gobi desert, it tells the story of a man and his dog, with the man being a kind of black sheep and the black dog (who may be a mirror of his own self) helping him to find redemption.

This powerful drama, with shades of a western, unexpected dark humor and some magnificent widescreen lensing, is the work of writer & director Guan Hu, who so far is most famous for his epic war movie The Eight Hundred, which topped the global box office in the pandemic stricken year 2020.

Black Dog (or: Gouzhen) stars Eddie Peng, who was born in Taiwan, spent most of his teenage years in Canada and is now considered one of China’s most bankable stars. He plays the role of Lang, a once successful musician, who fell from grace when he got involved in a murder case and subsequently spent a number of years in jail.

Now back in his dusty old hometown Lang is assigned to the local dog patrol team, led by his Uncle Yao (played by fellow filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke, whose own wonderful Caught By The Tides I reviewed a couple of months ago).

In the run-up to the 2008 Olympics the team has to clear the town’s abandoned factories of all the stray dogs living there, to make way for ambitious new construction projects.

Early on, though, Lang gets bitten by one lean and mean black greyhound (Xin, a truly amazing dog) and both have to stay indoors for a week to make sure they don’t have rabies. And even though at first they don’t like each other very much, over time they develop a solid bond of the heart, helping Lang face both his past trauma and his current problems.

There is his father, who has left the family home and has taken up residence in the nearby zoo, apparently intent on drinking himself of death. Even more pressing is the claim laid on him by local mob boss Butcher Hu (Xiaoguang Hu)
who wants payback for the death of his nephew, or else…

Lang finds some relief in a budding friendship with Grape (Lia Tong), who is part of a traveling circus, but Lang is too much of a lone to get romantically involved. He has to face his demons first, but at least he is not beyond redemption, and Guan Hu allows the movie to end on a hopeful note, with the equally magnificent Hey You by Pink Floyd blasting over the soundtrack.

I give it 8 1/2 out of ten!

Note: Since its Cannes premiere Black Dog has played the festival circuit, while also getting a theatrical release in various countries. It is currently in release in Norway and Portugal, while in the coming week it is released in The Netherlands, with Sweden to follow in early May.