After a nearly ten year hiatus, ‘The Accountant 2’ largely picks up from where its predecessor left off, but its at times labyrinthine plot requires a re-familiarization with the 2016 original in order for us to understand quite how Ben Affleck’s neurodivergent accountant for the mob is uniquely placed to help a federal agent investigate nefarious practices involving the disappearance of children sold for human trafficking.

Affleck’s character is able to assemble and decipher the pieces of the jigsaw which have eluded everyone else, and whose penchant for carrying out acts of assassination and brutality (not a million miles distinct from Jason Statham’s construction worker with special ops abilities in ‘A Working Man’) means that he is a foil for Anaïs (Daniella Pineda) who is a victim of human trafficking and who is both dangerous while also deserving of our sympathy.

Affleck is autistic and his brother, with whom he teams up, is a sociopath, and there are some questionable plot points regarding the extent to which either one of them is deemed ‘normal’ or neurotypical in the eyes of the other – akin, perhaps, to the way the world of ‘Goodfellas’ is populated with Italian and Irish gangsters who consider themselves family men and loving fathers and husbands when their profession suggests that normal rules hardly apply.

‘The Accountant 2’ is, however, tonally inconsistent – there are moments of humour to be extracted from scenes whereby Affleck, completely deadpan, works out complicated maths sums on the spot, but when he goes into killing mode it feels like we are in the midst of a different sort of movie, with some critics indeed liking the film to a superhero movie, just one set in the real world and where Affleck does not don a cape.

Affleck’s character is not supposed to be capable of empathy, so we watch him going to a dating convention and line dancing where his awkward social skills are presented, uncomfortably, for comic effect. Presumably he is quite able to administer killing sprees precisely because he lacks empathy, but again it just feels as though we are in familiar movie territory. The neurodivergence angle is merely paid lip service, making this a run of the mill film about someone with remarkable intellectual capacity, and without the first film this sequel has many gaps which are crying out to be filled.