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The sequel picks up eight years after the first movie introduced Affleck\u2019s Christian Wolff, a brilliant autistic forensic accountant who moonlights as a freelance avenger with help from friends. (The movie\u2019s breezy embrace of clich\u00e9 includes the stereotype of the autistic savant.) J.K. Simmons shows up as Ray King, the former director of the Treasury Department\u2019s 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\u2019s bloodlust.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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King\u2019s successor, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), re-enters afterward to help nudge the story forward as does Christian\u2019s 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\u2019s less back story here than in the first movie, which revisited Christian\u2019s brutal childhood and his Oedipally nurtured violent skill set. That frees up the filmmakers \u2014 like the first movie, this was written by Bill Dubuque and directed by Gavin O\u2019Connor \u2014 to focus on keeping all the people and parts nicely moving. Among these is Affleck, whose controlled, inward-directed performance holds the center.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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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 \u2014 blue-collar types, next-door dads, computer jockeys \u2014 who, when hard push comes to brutal shove comes to catastrophic violence, will take off their glasses \u00e0 la Clark Kent to transform into near-mystically gifted avengers. They lock and load, restoring order to a broken world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n