The scheme at the centre of Wes Anderson’s latest is as precisely matriculated and detailed as the auteur’s work. Wily 1950s business tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) decides to go full hog on a business plan to build an Empire via infrastructure, deals and percentage financing after surviving his sixth plane crash (one of the film’s best sequences). A Charles Foster Kane crossed with Trump egotist who wants to win at all cost, Korda is determined to leave a legacy – in business via his scheme, and generationally via his offspring. Though he has nine sons, he reconnects with his 20 year-old daughter Leisl (Mia Threapleton), a nun who carries unresolved family hurt and a pipe. Korda’s biggest deal then involves globetrotting via complex sets and dioramas, to raise capital and outwit a bureaucratic group who are falsely inflating costs – all while handing out hand grenades as gifts and outrunning a mysterious assassin who keeps trying to pop him. Along for the ride: Michael Cera’s delightful Norwegian tutor Bjorn, who has a dazzling collection of insects and ends up working above his paygrade as Zsa-zsa suffers another plane crash, quicksand and a battle to the death in a luxury hotel.
Del Toro, in practically every frame, is a hoot as Zsa-zsa, a man who is casual about death, serious about cards and a fan of hot baths. He’s matched by deadpan Threapleton who can transmit an exasperated eyeroll without actually moving her peepers. Another newbie to the Anderson stable, Riz Ahmed, makes an impression as Prince Farouk, while the returning troupe (Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray et al) do their fast-talking, comedic thing. But it’s Cera who really steals focus with a performance so singularly sweet and a lilting Scandinavian accent so charming that one wishes Anderson had given this character a whole film to himself.
Though there’s plenty of physical gags and willfully opaque business speak which could be interpreted as Anderson criticising capitalism, the matter at the core of the hijinks is the redemption of a man and the relationship between a father and daughter. And to that end – and the film’s end – there is emotional satisfaction. As expected, production design is a whimsical trove and monochrome scenes set in heaven (with Murray as God) are quirky sojourns. Anderson fans will likely not be unduly disappointed.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs courtesy of TPS PRODUCTIONS/FOCUS FEATURES The Phoenician Scheme premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
Ben Shattuck’s short story about two young men falling in love with each other and folk music is a thing of absolute beauty, filled with yearning, want and bucolic imagery. Shattuck has also written this screenplay and built out his fragile tale to a two hour movie that though handsome, well intentioned and delicately acted, fails to fully match the source material’s emotional resonance.
Gwen Capistran
We first encounter Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Conner) as they meet-cute – a couple of music students at a Boston Conservatory in 1917 who connect over a piano in a bar, and then in bed later that night. Their fledgling romance is interrupted by WW1, with David getting drafted and Lionel returning to his family’s Kentucky farm. Lionel pines for his lost love so when David reappears post-conflict and invites him on a song collecting trip around New England, he jumps at the chance. The two men camp and hike to remote communities, archiving folksongs on a phonograph, cuddling in their tent and not saying what’s really on their minds like a folksy Brokeback Mountain. But David is tightly-wound, clearly rattled by his experiences in Europe and the trip cannot last forever…
Gwen Capistran
Shattuck’s short story is economic with detail but gives more lived-in texture to the affair than Oliver Hermanus’ stately film does which is as coy with its sex scenes as it is in showing the duo’s passion for music. The ‘history of sound’ is what Lionel yearns for in recalling his relationship with David as an older man (played by Chris Cooper) – not the ditties picked up and preserved on wax cylinders but the vibrations of being with someone in nature, in love. ‘Sound is invisible but can touch something, make an impression,’ Lionel explains at one point in a beautifully composed farmhouse tableau. Audiences might want more evidence of this than they are afforded in a film that creates striking visuals (an old man collapsed in a sun-bleached tree, the crystalline lake beneath an oar, Rome at magic hour) and haunting audio of fluting harmonies. Mescal and O’Conner are excellent, of course – carrying regret like the backpacks they shoulder – and production values are exemplary. But The History Of Sound offers something akin to blank sheet music, requiring the viewer to add notations.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs by GWEN CAPISTRAN Courtesy of FAIR WINTER LLC The History of Sound premiered at the 78th Cannes film festival
In his debut feature Charlie Polinger riffs on The Lord Of The Flies but makes it entirely his own and pertinent to today’s politics, social media pile-ons and the cowardice of allowing cruelty to another to ensure one’s own safe passage. An adolescent study in social hierarchy and coercion, The Plague is what the 12 and 13 year old boys at a 2003 water polo camp call the rash that one of their number has developed during the summer. Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) is a ‘weird kid’, and his skin condition is deemed to be highly contagious by ringleader Jake (Kayo Martin) who has already bullied a boy over it in a previous summer session. When mild-mannered Ben (Everett Blunck) turns up, the fractured dynamics in his home and a speech impediment make him self-protect – he’d rather allow cruel taunts and ostracising than make a stand. Their coach (Joel Edgerton) is no ally anyway. A well-meaning man who sees unkindness as a right of passage based on his own high school experiences, he may shout at the group about compassion but he’s not willing or able to do anything about it.
Spooky Pictures
Foreboding sound design, score and cinematography make The Plague an uneasy watch from the start, the muffled underwater world of a swimming pool strafed with diving boys, the queasy chlorinated lighting of locker rooms and dark corners of a brutalist sports centre. This is a world of hard surfaces and no digital escape via cell phones or social media. The claustrophobic society created in the changing rooms and dorms is what we, and Ben, are stuck with as Jake smirkingly controls the group by picking apart any perceived weakness. Ben can’t pronounce his ‘t’s, cannot enunciate ‘stop’, so is christened ‘Soppy’ and ridiculed for his vegetarianism. It’s enough to not want to make him protest as Eli is humiliated in the lunch room, showers and, in a particularly vulnerable moment, when the arrival of girls causes an embarrassing reaction.
Polinger teases horribly recognisable performances out of his young cast; Blunck’s panic is infectious while Rasmussen is unexpected in every scene as a boy who is being bullied for being different but trying to own it. A moment where he dances like nobody’s watching (even though every one is) is heartbreaking and triumphant. But the standout is Martin who wears a knowing smile most of the time and has charisma to burn. Playing like a young Michael J Fox turned feral, he has a sweet face, a smart mouth and the instincts of a killer. The way his lips curl as he detects fallibility, ready to weaponise it, is the stuff that haunts all our memories of adolescence. And the ease with which his controlled community abuses a teammate is something we can all recognise in all social groups, both intimate and global. Ben’s ultimate question of ethics is one posed to every audience member.
Spooky Pictures
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs courtesy of SPOOKY PICTURES The Plague premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
Photography by LAKIN OGUNBANWO Words by JANE CROWTHER
‘I will see you in dreams,’ says one of the delightfully cheeky children at the heart of this haunting tale of hindsight, loss, identity and love from Akinola Davis jr. The film, co-written by Davies and his brother, Wale, is like a vivid dream; loaded with so much evocative imagery that one can practically smell the food cooking in the teeming streets of Lagos, feel the heat from the dusty road and taste the salt of the beach where a key moment plays out. It is a loving portrait of both West Nigeria and a parent who comes sharply into focus when remembered on one adventurous day in 1993.
Lakin Ogunbanwo/BBC Films
The father in question, Fola (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù), is largely absent from the lives of two brothers, Akin and Remi (Godwin Chimerie Egbo and Chibiuke Marvellous Egbo) who live in a rural town, constantly awaiting the return of both their parents from work. One day, as the wind whispers through the trees and fruit rots on the ground, Dad arrives home. As he moves through the house alighting on various personal possessions, he brusquely suggests his sons accompany him on his trip into the capital to collect money owed to him from shift work. The three of them squash into a bus for the journey but amid the petrol shortages and political unrest of the recent elections, it breaks down. Now begins the real odyssey, as the trio hitchhike to Lagos and are consumed within its messy, chaotic, bright and busy centre – zipping around on motorbikes, hanging out with Dad’s friends, visiting a closed-down fairground, watching the city hold its breath waiting for the election results in a bar as beer bottles sweat.
Lakin Ogunbanwo/BBC Films
Daddy suffers from nosebleeds, has an unspoken past and is wary of the soldiers patrolling the streets with watchful eyes. His trauma and possible infidelity flutter within the periphery of a day that crystallises both boys’ image of their father. In their jumbled recollection Fola is a stern parent, a swimming teacher, a protector, a provider, hurt by his own childhood and filled with hope for better days, politically and personally. He feels so fully formed by all the aspects of himself coming together during this day, that a stunningly beautiful beach scene begins an emotional ache that lingers to the final, sorrowful moments. Throughout, decay and rot is catalogued via decaying fruit, bones, the circling of vultures – and once linked by a deft foreshadowing twist, Davis’ film packs real emotional punch.
Dìrísù is magnificent in a role that may see him on the same trajectory as Paul Mescal when he arrived in Cannes with Aftersun, ably supported by plucky performances by his young co-star brothers. The film also makes non-fiction history in being the first Nigerian film to be in competition at the festival, despite the power of Nollywood. And what a gorgeous, evocative, smart and tender portrait of Nigeria and a family it is.
No bodily fluid is left untouched in Kristen Stewart’s raw, unflinching poem to wetness, adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir. Adapted (with Andy Mingo) and directed by the actor with Imogen Poots as Stewart’s front-of-camera proxy playing Lidia, it charts the non-linear, tortured path of a girl who is sexually abused by her father and finds sanctity in the chlorinated depths of her school swim team. Her prowess in the pool is what sets her free to some degree, taking her away from a somnambulist mother and her father’s fingers to college where sex, drugs and the healing power of writing led to pregnancy, addiction, self destruction and the redemption of art. And always there is immersion in water: in baths, lakes, pools, showers, rain. ‘In water, like in books,’ Lidia intones in one of many overlapping, murmured voiceovers offered like dream-state remembrances, ‘you can leave your life.’
Told in four chapters, it explores the legacy of trauma, the physical/emotional pain of losing a child, BDSM and the difficulty and release of becoming an artist. A writer from childhood, Lidia’s confronting prose finds purpose when she joins a writer’s class with author Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi) at the University Of Oregon. But can she trust an older man who values her work? Or is he another predatory male? And does the sweet college boy who becomes her partner (Earl Cave) deserve the disdain she literally spits in his face?
Impressionistic yet graphic, The Chronology of Water shows a woman experiencing all her body is capable of: female ejaculation, excretion, birth, orgasm, destruction. And It seems that Stewart pours all of the teaching she’s gained from the dazzling array of filmmakers she’s worked with as an actor into the production of a woozy, elemental, bruising mood piece that is like its protagonist; messy, unbridled, in need of structure. Stewart has described her film presented to Cannes as a ‘first draft’ and in that regard it could use some corralling; but equally, like Lidia, it shows fierce potential. As Kesey notes, ‘you can write, girl’.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photography courtesy of Scott Free Productions The Chronology of Water premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
‘Hindsight,’ runs Eddington’s tagline on its poster depicting buffalo tumbling off the side of a cliff, ‘is 2020’. For Ari Aster’s latest, that means training his quirky eye on America, linking where we are now to events of 2020 when Covid bred paranoia, conspiracy and MAGA like a socio-polical petri dish. Popping the pandemic in a neo-noir Western set in the appellative New Mexico town during May of that year, Aster picks at virtue signalling, bandwagonning, social media, fake news, radicalisation, trauma and first amendment jingoism via the moral and emotional meltdown of the town sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix).
A mild-mannered chap in a fraught marriage to his doll-making, damaged wife Lou (Emma Stone) and living with his conspiracist mother-in-law (Deidre O’Connell), Joe is law-abiding until medical mandates come around. An asthma-sufferer, the sheriff does not believe anyone should wear a mask if they don’t want to (or that Covid is a real threat) and clashes with mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). The two men have history involving Lou and Joe is fired up enough to run for office against his romantic rival, leaning into NRA/MAGA sentiments and further losing his rag when Lou brings home a charismatic cult leader (Austin Butler) and gazes at him in a way she hasn’t looked at her husband in many moons. Suddenly, this is no longer a movie in the vein of John Sayles’ Lone Star and takes an Asterian turn to something darker, more febrile and explosively ludicrous. As Aster films go, it’s less challenging than the big swings of Beau Is Afraid but not as startlingly fresh as Hereditary.
Peppered with as many fatalities as delicious performances, Eddington is surprisingly droll, luridly violent and has the prescience to use a Katy Perry song in a film that worries about the potential stranglehold of big tech in all aspects of life. (The proposed data bank that promises infrastructure and jobs for the area looms throughout as bellwether commentators warn of political control, ecological impact and wealth disparity.) There’s gallows humour to be found as characters declare Covid is ‘not a here problem’, espouse the virtues of Bitcoin and watch TikTok videos as news. The ranting homeless man who staggers into town at the start muttering incoherently about perceived wickedness is no longer the anomaly as ideologies burn brighter, fuelled by misinformation, frustration and ultimately, actually gasoline.
This is an accomplished cast so it’s no surprise that Phoenix holds focus despite playing an insubstantial man with shifting morals, ably supported by Pascal (stoic), Stone (fragile), Butler (scene-stealingly slithery) and Michael Ward, faultless as an ambitious sheriff department officer who becomes a pawn. Nothing so horrific as the decapitation of Hereditary, but Eddington offers a seething discomfort in recognising the start of the slip towards the dumpster-fire rolling-news reality we now live in. Which is truly terrifying.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photography courtesy of A24 Eddington premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
Student Alice is used to being picked up and brushed off by her parents whenever she stumbles. Though we never see her, we hear and know about her via her parents; over-protective Frank (Matthew Rhys) and his exasperated paramedic wife Maddie (Rosamund Pike). Early in the small hours, Alice calls her sleep-deprived mum in a panic – she has taken her dad’s car and driven to the titular road in a nearby forest where she’s accidentally knocked over a pedestrian. The parents jump into Maddie’s car to reach her, their SatNav informing them of the distance to reach their daughter while an increasingly upset Alice keeps them abreast over the speakerphone of the terrible, fatal mess she’s got herself into.
Courtesy of Universal Pictures
Essentially a real-time bottle episode in the vein of Locke, Hallow Road then unfurls, one mile and minute at a time, in the car as the couple struggle to help their child remotely, question their parenting and reveal the fractured family dynamic that preceded Alice storming out of the house earlier. And as the country roads become more labyrinthine and dark, a folk horror aspect begins to hover over proceedings as both parents’ psychological secrets come to the fore.
Hallow Road starts with a warning – a battery depleted smoke alarm chirruping – and grows in tension and disquiet as Rhys and Pike master myriad emotions while the green dashboard light casts a queasy hue over their distraught faces. To give more detail would be to spoil, but if you’re familiar with director Babak Anvari’s previous work in Under The Shadow, the fact that the crisis at the start of this thriller morphs to something more primal and primordial at its close should come as no surprise. Like the fraught relationship between parents and daughter (voiced by Megan McDonnell), there is something else going on in the trees – what exactly is open to interpretation by each viewer. And, based on a post-credit sting, those interpretations will not necessarily align.
Playing like a lost episode of Inside No 9, this disorientating, brisk thriller is an easy way to spend 80 minutes this weekend while also opening conversations of guilt, grief, helicopter parenting and the inherent creepiness of deep, dark woods.
In case you missed the previous instalment, The Final Reckoning begins by ensuring viewers are on the right page with this adventure, kicking off a couple of months after the events of Tom Cruise’s 2023 summer blockbuster. Now Ethan Hunt’s (Cruise) hair is longer, his tech whiz Luther (Ving Rhames) is ill and the rogue AI threat, The Entity, has plunged the world into chaos. The Entity plans to initiate a world wipeout via armageddon by taking control of the nuclear codes of all nations, the only way to stop it is to retrieve its source code from the bottom of the Arctic ocean where it’s trapped in a crashed Russian sub (seen in Dead Reckoning) and then play out a complicated game of digi cat-and-mouse. The only person who can complete this mission is Hunt – appealed to by the US president (Angela Bassett) – and the thorn in his side is Big Bad Gabriel (Esai Morales) who holds a vital piece of the plan. The mission is literally world-saving and it triggers Hunt’s memories of all the people he’s lost and all the crazy stuff he’s done across seven previous films. Cruise and his co-conspirator/producer/director Christopher McQuarrie set this chapter up as a swan song (but is it really?), and ensure it goes out with a bang.
Courtesy of Paramount PicturesCourtesy of Paramount Pictures
As is now expected of Cruise, The Final Reckoning ups the ante on stunts that its star completes personally, his face clearly visible as his body is battered by water and G-force. While there’s plenty of globetrotting, trademark running, mask removal, double crossing and bomb defusing, the big ticket here are two set-pieces in which Cruise and cinematic innovation are pushed to their limits. After a series of fights and escapes, Hunt embarks on solo deep diving to the Russian submarine, his chance of drowning immeasurable due to depth, location, temperature. Add to that a sub that is glitchy and moving on the Baring seabed, and the sequence becomes literally breathtaking as Hunt is trapped in the oceanic version of a freezing washing machine as his oxygen depletes. The production built the world’s deepest and largest water tank at Longcross studios and devised new diving masks to show Cruise’s face to complete the scenes for real, and it translates. It’s a claustrophobic, teeth-clenching watch.
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
It’s no spoiler to mention the finale – promotion quite rightfully leans hard into the vintage bi-plane sequence which see Cruise clinging to the spindly wings of not one, but two different swooping, diving and barrelling planes with South Africa’s stunning Drakensberg Mountains flying beneath him. His face flapping in the G-force, his body weightless as the planes invert, this is another breath snatching moment (certainly for Cruise trying to suck a breath in hurricane-level wind resistance) and provides some much needed levity. There’s a reason Hunt is costumed like Indiana Jones at this point – it’s the sort of delirious der-doing that evokes classic cinema. It’s worth the ticket price alone.
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Though the extended IMF team play a part in proceedings (a bow-out adds emotional resonance), they are certainly second fiddle, facilitators to the Hunt show. That may disappoint fans who enjoyed the previous spike of Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klementieff). Via additional characters the movie champions the unpredictability of human nature, the concept of being on the right side of history despite the rules, the celebration of the rebel, the maverick. That’s seen in Bassett’s POTUS, Hannah Waddington’s aircraft carrier Admiral and Tramell Tillman’s sub captain who likes to call everyone ‘mister’ (bringing Jeff Goldblum levels of deliciously unexpected line delivery). But the star is certainly Cruise, his previous M:I incarnations celebrated in flashback montages and his character praised continuously by his team. ‘Only you can do this,’ he is constantly told, and when you see Cruise dangling off the corner of a vintage Boeing Stearman as it flips around a canyon, you might have to agree.
Created for work but famed for film flights of fancy, Hollywood Authentic celebrates downtown LA’s Bradbury Building, a storied location fit for a Blade Runner.
When Victorian millionaire Lewis Bradbury decided to build an office for him to commute to, he didn’t want to travel far. His lavish 50-room mansion on Bunker Hill in Downtown LA looked over real estate on 3rd Street, and Bradbury bought land to create a magnificent office block a 10-minute walk from his front door. (From 1901, he might have used the Angel’s Flight funicular railway to glide up and down the hill.) He died in 1892, just months before the build was completed, so he never saw the finished magnificence of the ornate wrought-iron railings and birdcage elevators, soaring skylights and gorgeous tilework that make this La-La landmark a regular stop for gawking walking tours and ensure it is now a part of cinematic history.
Bradbury wanted to exhibit the wealth he had amassed from gold and silver mining and, after a false start with an architect he lost faith in, he commissioned a young draftsman, George Wyman, to design his monument. Wyman, for his part, was unsure of taking on such a huge project as a first gig, but took the job despite his inexperience after he consulted his dead brother via Ouija board. The fledgling architect had his eye on the future when he conceived the building – taking inspiration from an 1888 time travel sci-fi novel by Edward Bellamy. In Looking Backward, the year 2000 was envisaged as a Socialist Utopian society where buildings were high rises with glass roofs. In Wyman’s futuristic interpretation, he designed a huge glass atrium under which wrought-iron railings hung like vegetation, and marble staircases and detailed elevators transported workers up and down the five floors – run on a counterweighted water system that came from a natural spring discovered under the site during construction. (They were later converted to hydraulic power.)
During its construction, Wyman imported Italian marble, Mexican tiles and French wrought iron (which was shown at the Chicago World’s Fair as new-fangled before being installed in the atrium). It cost Bradbury half a million dollars – a huge amount even for a millionaire who liked to flash his cash – and opened in 1893 to tenants such as Bradbury’s own legal team. It has maintained its use as a commercial building since then, one of the oldest in LA – though it had a period during the Prohibition era when a speakeasy was run out of the basement with booze distributed via a network of tunnels. It’s now the only commercial office building in Los Angeles to be designated as a National Historic Landmark. And though it has had a recent period-sympathetic restoration courtesy of the ownership team, Downtown Properties (who also look after The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel), now boasting a co-working office, gallery space and a buzzy members-only bar; the lure of many visiting the building is the chance to walk in the rain-drenched footsteps of replicant hunter, Deckard.
Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s trailblazing 1982 neo-noir sci-fi, was shot here when the production was looking for a location to play the home of replicant godfather, Tyrell, who LAPD’s Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) pays a visit to – only to find Daryl Hannah’s backflipping Pris and a much-quoted denouement on the roof with Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty. Deckard peers out of his car window at the stone-carved Bradbury sign from 3rd Street, before making his way into a lobby dressed for the 21st century (2017) – an advertising blimp floating above in a neon sky, casting light into the darkness of the distinct balconies and elevator shafts. Scott’s cyberpunk vibe nodded to Old Hollywood, and the Bradbury certainly matched that aesthetic – not only in its looming shadows but the fact that noirs such as 1944’s Double Indemnity, 1949’s D.O.A. and 1951’s M had also used the place as a location. Later, the building would be Jack Nicholson’s offices in Wolf, and the workspace of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s romantic greetings card writer in 500 Days of Summer. In The Artist, Jean Dujardin’s silent era star passes Bérénice Bejo’s ingenue on the recognisable stairs, representing the trajectory of their characters’ careers as he walks down and she skips up. And Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation music video also used the dry-ice swirled elevators and plant room. The Bradbury is also a literary inspiration: it’s the stand-in for the Belmont in Raymond Chandler’s The High Window, described by his PI Marlowe as ‘eight stories of nothing’ with a ‘dark narrow lobby… as dirty as a chicken yard’.
For Scott’s story, the building was set-dressed to look dilapidated, with lights rigged to track across the staircases. The nearby Grand Union train station stood in for Police HQ, while Frank Lloyd Wright’s distinctive Ennis House in Los Feliz was Deckard’s home. The use of real buildings was a deliberate choice for Scott who said ‘if the future is one you can see and touch, it makes you a little uneasier because you feel it’s just round the corner’. It worked for the celebrated author of the short story, Do Android Dream Of Electric Sheep?, on which the film is based, Philip K Dick. ‘It’s like being transported to the ultimate city of the future, with all the good things and all the bad things about it,’ he enthused after seeing Scott’s slick, neon-drenched vision for his tale in a pre-visualisation reel.
Hollywood Authentic couldn’t resist using our own theatrics during our shoot, getting permission to use smoke in the listed building to replicate a Blade Runner vibe
Though the offices above the lobby are not open to visitors (so no looking for Pris in the rooms above), the Bradbury understands the interest in its architectural and cinematic legacy. The impressive lobby is open to the public throughout the working day in the week and over lunch at the weekend when the bustling Central Market opposite is a hive of activity. Anyone can take a detour to crane their neck at the Victorian glazing overhead, the manned elevators and lacework bannisters. There is a way to earn the privilege of climbing the stairs like the LAPD’s finest Blade Runner: the work and desk spaces are available to rent and Wyman’s Bar – where a lifesized Deckard print decorates the wall – offers ‘social memberships’.
Was anyone asking for a sequel to Ben Affleck’s neurodivergent actioner from 2016 in which a money man with Autism kicks serious ass as a besuited assassin? Possibly not, but here we are nearly a decade later, returning to Christian Wolff (Affleck) as he lays low in a gulfstream trailer with priceless artwork on the wall in Boise, and now there’s not one socially awkward killer gunning his way through a criminal underworld, but two. This time the number in the title not only refers to sequel status but the return of Wolff’s hit man brother, Braxton, in the shape of Corgi-loving, lollipop-sucking bull-in-a-china-shop Jon Bernthal. Double trouble and twice the fun.
Courtesy Amazon MGM Studios
Laying out the set-up with a stylishly executed shoot-up in a bingo hall involving J. K. Simmons, The Accountant 2 introduces a mysterious hit woman (Daniella Pineda) who is connected to the trafficking of undocumented immigrant workers into the US. The death of an innocent pulls a treasury department agent, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) into proceedings and she tracks Wolff down via his nonverbal tech-whiz handler (Allison Robertston) to help her unravel the mystery. Why Chris decides to take the case is as confusing as why Marybeth can move house and spend most days away from her desk job in service to an off-books gig, but the logistics matter little. It’s merely the route to getting Bernthal and Affleck together to bicker, go line-dancing together and cover each other during massive gun/knife fights.
This is where the film comes into its own as both brothers express hurt and bewilderment at their estrangement, unpick their childhood trauma, figure out if they’re cat or dog people and ultimately show up for each other – whether that’s at an LA hoedown or a Mexican bad-guy compound in Juarez. Affleck and Bernthal can do this stuff in their sleep and their needling of each other adds welcome levity to proceedings, while both actors’ flex their action credentials in a dusty finale that nods to spaghetti westerns. Yes, it’s blunt and daft but it’s more fun than taxes…
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs by ELI ADÉ/WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. The Accountant 2 is out now
