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    Watch Ben Affleck Line Dance in ‘The Accountant 2’

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    The director Gavin O’ Connor narrates a sequence from the film featuring the actor and Jon Bernthal.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Ben Affleck kicks up his sneakers on the dance floor in this spirited sequence from “The Accountant 2.”Affleck’s character, Christian Wolff, an autistic C.P.A., has gone with his brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal), to a country western bar. Using calculations, Christian quickly figures out the pattern of a line dance and joins in.Discussing the scene in an interview, the film’s director, Gavin O’ Connor, explained that the scene was meant to accomplish several things as the film moves deeper into the second act. He added, “Bill Dubuque, our writer, and I wanted to abandon the plot and just make a hard left turn and go spend time with the brothers in a social environment so we can deepen their relationship while also allowing Christian the opportunity to connect with a woman in a way he’s never done before.”This leads to a moment in which Braxton expects his brother might make a fool of himself, but things turn out differently.“It dramatizes his mathematical brain, because you watch him start to look at the footwork and it all starts to compute very quickly,” O’Connor said in the interview.He also said Affleck attended several rehearsals to get the moves right: “We had a choreographer named Jennifer Hamilton who was wonderful, and before we got to the rehearsal stage, she was presenting me with a bunch of different ideas, because there are a lot of variations on line dancing, and then we narrowed it down.”They worked out the choreography with the dancers before bringing Affleck in. “Then Ben just did his thing,” O’Connor said. “Christian didn’t have to be great. He just had to do it. So it was never important that he lit the place on fire.”Read the “Accountant 2” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘The Accountant 2’ Review: Ben Affleck’s Revenge of the Killer Nerd

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      Affleck returns as a brilliant C.P.A. who moonlights as a mysterious, gun-toting fixer and gets help from his little bro, played by Jon Bernthal.“The Accountant 2” is a blithely nonsensical, enjoyably vulgar follow-up to “The Accountant” (2016) about a numbers whiz played by Ben Affleck, who has impeccable marksmanship and shaky people skills. Like the first movie, the sequel embraces violence without apology, slathers the screen with (fake) blood and unleashes a small army of stunt performers who convincingly play dead. This one has another complicated intrigue and a great deal of plot, though most of the tension comes from watching Affleck struggle to suppress a smile while sharing the screen with an exuberantly showboating Jon Bernthal.The sequel picks up eight years after the first movie introduced Affleck’s Christian Wolff, a brilliant autistic forensic accountant who moonlights as a freelance avenger with help from friends. (The movie’s breezy embrace of cliché includes the stereotype of the autistic savant.) J.K. Simmons shows up as Ray King, the former director of the Treasury Department’s criminal investigations unit. He briefly enters wearing a cap and soon exits without a pulse, though not before setting the story in motion. Cue the gunfire and choreographed chaos, as well as amnesia, plastic surgery, trafficked women, child hostages and a miscellany of villains, ones who are cruel enough to bring out (and amply stoke) the audience’s bloodlust.King’s successor, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), re-enters afterward to help nudge the story forward as does Christian’s younger brother, Braxton (Bernthal). Everything (and everyone) flows together more or less, even when the story strains credulity, as B-movie shoot-em-ups often do. It helps that there’s less back story here than in the first movie, which revisited Christian’s brutal childhood and his Oedipally nurtured violent skill set. That frees up the filmmakers — like the first movie, this was written by Bill Dubuque and directed by Gavin O’Connor — to focus on keeping all the people and parts nicely moving. Among these is Affleck, whose controlled, inward-directed performance holds the center.One irresistible draw of a diversion like this is that while its good guys are often bad, its bad guys are assuredly worse. Both Christian and especially Braxton have obvious moral failings (ha!), but their kill counts are never the problem, which puts them in fine, crowded company. American movies love gunslingers, after all, whether they have Texas or British accents, wear white hats or gray ones like Christian. Among these are the seemingly ordinary men — blue-collar types, next-door dads, computer jockeys — who, when hard push comes to brutal shove comes to catastrophic violence, will take off their glasses à la Clark Kent to transform into near-mystically gifted avengers. They lock and load, restoring order to a broken world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Death, Taxes and Ben Affleck: ‘The Accountant’ Gets a Sequel

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      In the movie class of 2016, “The Accountant” was a wild-card.It told an original story for adults, breaking from the family-friendly intellectual property derivatives that crowded the top of the box office charts. And though it resembled a durable breed of man-on-a-mission action thrillers, it had an absurdist, gleefully dorky twist — Ben Affleck playing a neurodivergent bookkeeper and consigliere to the criminal underworld.Audiences responded. “The Accountant” outperformed expectations in theaters, earning $155.5 million globally (according to Box Office Mojo), and was the No. 1 most rented movie of 2017 (according to Comscore), ahead of “Moana,” “Wonder Woman” and “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.”Nine years and a change of studios later, a sequel, “The Accountant 2,” arrives on Friday, with Affleck and much of the original cast (Jon Bernthal, J.K. Simmons, Cynthia Addai-Robinson) returning, along with the director Gavin O’Connor and the screenwriter Bill Dubuque. In two conversations — one at South by Southwest in March, before the film’s premiere there, and another virtually earlier this month — Affleck, O’Connor and Dubuque discussed regaining the rights to the story, the definition of success and a potential idea for a third film.These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Affleck, right, with Jon Bernthal in “The Accountant 2.”Amazon StudiosBill, you wrote the script for the first “Accountant” independently — before an actor or a director was involved. Where did the main character, Christian Wolff, come from?BILL DUBUQUE I know people who are on the spectrum, and I thought something like this might be interesting; I’ve always been interested in how the brain works. I thought we could take this character who has a certain set of skills, a certain set of vulnerabilities, and not make him a victim but put him in a situation that was entertaining and where you felt something for him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More