‘THE ACCOUNTANT 2’ RATED R

“The Accountant 2” is nearly a decade removed from its origin story. Understanding Ben Affleck’s titular role of Christian Wolff requires knowing about his original position of a CPA working out of an Illinois strip mall with a side job befitting an assassin.

In the public realm, Wolff exhibited a tense, rigid behavior, possessed of an inability for normal social interactions, but nevertheless demonstrated a brilliance in mathematics and solving complex puzzles.

The other side of Wolff’s skills, despite his autism or Rain Man-like demeanor, was being wired as a hardnosed killing machine due to childhood training from his militaristic father.

Years later in this sequel, Wolff maintains his low-key demeanor and acts about as socially awkward as Tony Shalhoub’s detective Adrian Monk, albeit prone to violent conduct, while still acting as an accountant for unsavory characters.

The action swiftly kicks in when J.K. Simmons’ Ray King, now a private eye retired from the Treasury Department, is encountered by a blonde female assassin (Daniella Pineda) at a low-rent nightclub.

Gun-toting thugs show up and chaos ensues. Even though taking out some of the bad guys, Ray does not get far. His former assistant, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), discovers that Ray has scrawled “Find the accountant” on his arm.

Ray had been working on a case of a disappearing immigrant family, and Marybeth is tasked to pick up the trail. Having a past with the accountant, she’s not too thrilled having to connect again with the erratic and lethal Wolff.

Even if emotionally stunted, Wolff delivers some humor with his inability to read social cues or to interact in a way that is not clumsy, an amusing example of that is how ineptly he deals with a parade of single women at a speed dating seminar.

Drawn into the investigation of Ray’s death, Wolff must engage his estranged brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal), also an assassin for hire, to leave Berlin and come to the squalid underbelly of Los Angeles.

Apart from the last nine years, the brothers reconnect by sharing beers and conversation on top of Wolff’s Airstream trailer and at a honky-tonk dive bar where Wolff loosens up after unexpectedly joining a country line dance with an attractive cowgirl.

Leading up to the violent, climactic showdown south of the border, Wolff and Braxton take on a righteous mission to hunt down sex traffickers who had a nefarious plan involving a busload of young children, resulting in all hell breaking loose in a blaze of gunfire.

The plot often feels scattershot but the real joy of “The Accountant 2” is the relationship between Wolff and Braxton, which at times is fraught with tension because they are opposites, but otherwise their odd buddy chemistry carries the day.

“The Accountant 2” delivers a good action thriller with the dynamic partnership of siblings prone to violence, who turn out to be the good guys dispatching truly horrible villains.

THE LAST WORD ON THE TCM CLASSIC FILM FESTIVAL

This column submits to a fact-check in relation to what was previously reported about the Marx Brothers. Groucho, Chico, and Harpo are most familiar as the siblings that appeared in all their films.

The youngest of the five brothers were Gummo and Zeppo, with the latter the only one born in the 20th century. This column erroneously reported that only Zeppo never appeared in any of the films, when it was Gummo who performed only in the vaudeville acts and none of the movies.

“Animal Crackers,” which Groucho described as his favorite, was a pre-Code comedy from 1930 that had to be cut for re-release in 1936. The original was thought to be lost, and decades later, a print was found in the British Film Institute and finally screened in 2016.

It was a treat then for the TCM festival to screen “Animal Crackers,” which can only be described as typical Marx Brothers mayhem when a priceless painting vanished during a party honoring Groucho’s explorer Captain Spaulding.

“Animal Crackers” is also one of the five films in which Zeppo Marx played the straight man, while everyone else gleefully embraced the Marx Brothers’ brand of anarchic humor.

Two partners in the film business best known for unusual biopics, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, introduced the film, with Larry calling it the “Holy Grail for Marx Brothers addicts.”

Scott relayed a humorous story of his childhood admiration for Groucho, and how during the Seventies a special screening of “Animal Crackers” occurred in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Westwood, home of UCLA.

Students from the nearby campus showed up in droves to get a glimpse of Groucho, causing mayhem when they tossed boxes of Animal Crackers in the air. Meanwhile, Scott said that he and his father managed by subterfuge to get into the screening and sat behind the film’s director.

A lesson learned from the TCM festival is the need to catch up on all Marx Brothers films. So far, “Room Service” and “Duck Soup” are personal favorites.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.