Brothers with arms: Jon Bernthal and Ben Affleck in ‘The Accountant 2’.
THE ACCOUNTANT 2 ***1/2 (132 minutes) MA
Those who enjoyed the playful action of the 2016 film are set to have an even better time with this well-cobbled follow on, a terrific blam-blam fiesta in which Ben Affleck’s autistic accountant to the crims is joined by his brother, a professional killer with a yappy nature played with scene-stealing zeal by Jon Bernthal.
With as much emphasis on humour as there is on bloody shoot-outs and bone-crunching fights, the pair are in search of a missing migrant family.
It’s a trail that takes them through a scribble of plotlines involving drug cartels, Russian thugs (the new favourite stereotype when casting heavies) and the human trafficking of children, which works neatly in the third act as an emotional hook to give meaning to all the proficiently staged exchanges of automatic gunfire.
There’s plenty of techno wizardry here as Affleck’s “people” (mostly teens) use their digital know-how to track people’s movements and locations. It’s similar to what we saw in The Amateur and is an increasingly common feature in many action thrillers since the Bourne films.
In the pre-digital age all this would have been the purview of gumshoes and expensive stakeouts, a world of analog sleuthing now replaced by a few clicks on a keyboard.
A caution, though: The Accountant 2 contains a scene involving the unfiltered depiction of line dancing that some might find enjoyable.
While this might be unremarkable to some, it could prove stressful to those of us still struggling with the realization that line dancing can actually be cool to watch, a revelation unleashed in 2010 by the remake of Footloose.
There. You’ve been warned.
NT LIVE: DR STRANGELOVE *1/2 (130 minutes)
Given the talent and endorsements involved you would have reasonably expected this stage musical adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s epochal 1964 satire to have been much better than the clumsy hodgepodge served up here.
Alas, it’s a fair bet that the more you love the movie, the more you’ll dislike this bloated misfire.
Steve Coogan plays four roles (the president; the British army officer; the bomber pilot; Strangelove), the thing was co-adapted with director Sean Foley by Armando Iannucci – showing none of the trademark acuity from having masterminded The Thick of It & Veep) – and carries the approval of the Kubrick Estate.
None of that keeps the soiree from being a lugubrious, flatulent affair that curiously skims over the film’s most famous moments (the phone call, for instance) and dials down the war room mania, most notably via the remarkably flat performance by Giles Terera as General Buck Turgidson, played so brilliantly by George C Scott in the film.
And where the heck is Miss Foreign Affairs? How could they have even considered adapting the film without her luminous presence?