An Action Movie State Of The Union: 'The Accountant 2' and 'Havoc'
#317: "The Accountant," "Havoc," "Mission: Impossible," "
Edition 317:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: We’re all about that action boss! Starting with a new release action movie in theaters and one on Netflix—Ben Affleck! Tom Hardy!—then pivoting to older versions of the same you can find one streaming services. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Zach Cregger makes a play for director superstardom with another intense thriller.
The Accountant 2
Considering its ubiquity on plane seatbacks and random Tuesday night streaming sessions, it’s pretty surprising to be reminded that the original The Accountant came out NINE years ago, in those more innocent days of October 2016.
Wait. Check out the wrinkles around star Ben Affleck’s brow, and the extra pounds he’s packed on around the midsection, and maybe the years aren’t so hard to believe.
Affleck is back as autistic super-soldier accountant Christian Wolff, the kind of three-word descriptor that made the first movie such a masterclass in high concept storytelling. He’s wired to do everything methodically, including killing a bunch of bad guys when the cartels whose money he launders come after him. Easy sell!
I doubt too much thought was given to a lot of the details and specifics of that first story, and nobody was walking away feeling like they left a ton of meat on the bone for a sequel.
But alas, nothing popular can ever be left alone anymore. So a sequel had to be produced, with all those distinct symptoms of sequel-itis, including a religious dedication to those very same specifics of this (I gag as I say this) cinematic universe.
Remember that random data analyst from the first one? (I didn’t.) Well now she’s the assistant treasure secretary, though that job title matters very little to her investigation other than saying repeatedly “we gotta do things by the book!” Remember that Wolff grew up in special orphan’s home for savants? (I didn’t.) Well an army of kids from that home basically serve as full-time hackers for him capable of multiple deus ex machina interventions.
Remember Wolff’s brother from the first one? (I kinda maybe sorta did?) Well that’s Jon Bernthal, and thanks to him, this movie has a reason for existing.
What this movie turns out to be is basically a buddy comedy starring two brothers who can’t really communicate because one has autism and the other one…uh…really wants a house pet? Not really sure what the issue is on Bernthal’s side but he’s wearing a sweet leather jacket and sucking a lollipop while doing it, so I don’t really care.
The specifics of the unfolding action here are complicated and convoluted and don’t matter a whole lot, as each individual scene is designed for maximum enjoyment, with premises that sound more like SNL sketch setups. For example: What would happen if Wolff went speed dating? Or country line dancing? Or if his assassin brother called a dog adoption agency?
Naturally, there’s enough scenes of the shooty shooty variety to classify this as an action movie, but no one (not even Affleck) seems especially interested in this part. We as the audience are waiting for all the bad guys to die so our bros can go back to wise-cracking each other.
Affleck is an undeniable movie star presence and has always been keenly aware of how he’s seen and perceived. And in Bernthal, the pure emotive supernova, he’s found a perfect sidekick. I’d follow them through whatever child trafficking double crossing nonsense this story asks me to follow.
Action movies these days can lean one of two directions — comedies with heartless gunplay mixed in or humorless slogs of hardcore action. If I must choose, I choose this first option.
Even if I didn’t love it, I am rooting for this movie. Despite all the nonsense it’s an $80 million non-BCE that’s so clearly a streaming play but is at least giving theaters a dummy effort to moderate success.
And sure, maybe it got outgrossed in its opening weekend by the rerelease of the third Star Wars prequel, a 20-year-old BCE that’s been readily available to stream this entire time. But hey! Putting movies and BCEs side by side every weekend at the box office is really all I could hope for.
Something New
Havoc (Netflix): Director Gareth Evans is for the people who love action for action’s sake. His The Raid and The Raid 2 are held up as some of the best action filmmaking of all time—though his combination of gritty handheld camera and insanely heightened violence causes my eyes to eventually glaze over. The target audience for this Tom Hardy-led shoot-em-up is the kind of person who describes someone taking a meat cleaver or a harpoon to another person’s face as “so sick.”
For me, if the action isn’t moving the story forward or developing character, it’s often just pew pew, bang bang, everyone dies except for all the main characters protected by plot armor. In this instance, the movie doesn’t even use the “ex special forces” excuse, it just drops Hardy’s homicide cop in as basically John Wick with a badge. Don’t think too hard about this plot, which appears to be constructed by taking a bunch of genre tropes like dirty cops, corrupt politicians, Triad gang members, and daddy issues, shaking them up in a bag and dumping them out in whatever order or deformed shape they land in.
This movie is meant to overwhelm you with its action prowess, and perhaps it should, but in a world of widespread CGI I think viewers like me just assume that anything can appear on screen in any form, so we are not appropriately impressed by practical execution. Or maybe, like I’ve said many times before, I’m just a plot whore. I live and die for a good story.
Something Old
Mission: Impossible (1996, Amazon Prime): The insanely scaled spectacle that this action franchise has become has, I think, clouded people’s memory of what the original movie was like. The great Brian de Palma (Scarface, The Untouchables) directs a script co-written by Steve Zallian (Schindler’s List, Moneyball, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), in what is really more an espionage adventure movie than crazy action flick. It’s basically what if James Bond hustled. Great premise!
Its twisty and unpredictable plot, stylish design, and statement stunt—the iconic wire descent down the CIA black site shaft—definitely set the template that the rest of the entries riffed on.
Plus, apparently this “final” M:I movie coming out in a few weeks is supposedly trying to tie up the plot strings of all these previous movies into some coherent bow (despite the fact that all these plots were improvised on the fly around the stunt planning). Doing homework has never been as fun as rewatching this movie will be.
Something To Stream
Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Netflix): The very first edition of this movie newsletter back in 2018 was talking about this sequel to one of the very best movies of the 2010s, and by comparison, I was disappointed with how commerce had out-arm-wrestled art (not knowing how inoffensive this one would be compared to what was coming in the seven years since).
And much like the other titles this week, this movie is far more interested in cool action stunts over coherent storytelling. There’s Mexican cartels, Islamic terrorists and Somali pirates in the mix, with the same brand of hardcore Americana that screenwriter Taylor Sheridan has, in the years since this movie, monetized into a half-dozen popular TV shows.
Still, none of the movies listed here have the swagger of this movie, which returns Josh Brolin and Guillermo del Toro as federal agents who subscribe to Stallin’s “Death is a solution to all problems” philosophy. The action is bigger, and frankly just better, than any of these other offerings.
Trailer Watch: Weapons
Barbarian was the kind of debut feature that gives a filmmaker a big chance. What you do next determines if you’re going to be a major, can’t-miss, season-ticket level filmmaker or just another flash in the pan. With this trailer, Zach Cregger seems to have ensured his place in that first category.
Allegedly (though it’s never been confirmed), the script for this movie was so good that when Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw productions was outbid for the rights to make this movie, Peele fired his longtime management team. That’s all the proof I need that this is going to be another horror/thriller banger.