So many of the victories we’ve claimed in the culture war in recent years haven’t been victories so much as draws. We celebrated when Snow White crashed and burned more, we ignored Captain America: Brave New World, and we told ourselves, “Get woke, go broke.” But that’s really their message fumbling rather than our message gaining yardage.
However, that seems to be changing.
The Accountant 2 isn’t just not woke; it’s downright conservative. A sequel to 2016’s The Accountant, the movie made a respectable $25 million in its first weekend, finishing in third place, barely behind the re-release of Revenge of the Sith. 110-pound girl bosses are throwing around accommodating stuntmen, no lectures on income inequality by actors making $30 million, and no LGBT propaganda conveniently edited out of the Chinese and Arabic translations.
It’s the most wonderfully conservative-coded film since last year’s Twisters!
Ben Affleck returns as an autistic hitman on a mission to rescue a family from human traffickers. He has a team of similarly autistic computer wiz-kids helping him, so the movie is a unique mixture of Jason Bourne, the X-Men, Sicario, and Rain Man – which we can only hope Affleck wrote on a whiteboard at some point.
The film also co-stars Jon Bernthal as Affleck’s brother, so this is also the closest we might ever get to a crossover between Batman and The Punisher. The two show the importance of family, masculine heroism, and gun ownership.
But more than that, the film explicitly critiques the evil of open borders. In an early scene, Affleck has tracked this lost family’s trail to a pizza factory in Los Angeles where all the workers are Hispanic. When Affleck asks the company’s owner if they were in the United States legally or illegally, the owner sanctimoniously responds:
“I don’t see people as legal or illegal – I only see them as human.”
But before you have time to brace yourself for a woke sermon, it’s revealed that he’s a sex trafficker. The film connects liberal virtue signaling to the evil forces who exploit it. While The Accountant never directly attacks the Biden Administration for its destructive open border policies – if you want that, we’re more than happy to – it entertains while showing the human cost of a real-world tragedy.
Trafficking is a horrifying problem where agents of evil exploit third-world bodies to get first-world money. In Sicario, Josh Brolin memorably says people replaced cocaine as the most valuable commodity smuggled over the US-Mexico border.
We hope that Accountant 2 can get the sort of publicity that we saw with likewise conservative, anti-human trafficking Sound of Freedom. (It’s baffling that opposition to human trafficking is a partisan issue, but that’s where we are in the world nowadays.) This pushback is significant nowadays since cartels have taken over social media.
Accountant 2 shows the need for virtuous, capable men to protect society from cartels and their ilk. This would have been unremarkable in the 1980s, but it’s a rare treasure in the 2020s. In a not-so-subtle nod to the community spirit of red America, Affleck’s accountant finds help to overcome his social shortcomings at a country bar where everyone is wearing American flags.
Despite its conservative nature, Accountant 2 has been universally praised by corporate media. Review aggregator CinemaScore gives it an A-, while Rotten Tomatoes has critics/audience scores of 78% and 93%, respectively, writing, “It can safely be filed under a good time at the movies.”
One reason left-wing Hollywood doubled down on the culture war was President Trump’s losing the popular vote in 2016 and 2020. If you make more money by selling your product to more people, it’s reasonably good business to appeal to the majority. However, with Trump’s devastating popular win in 2024, Hollywood can continue appealing to the minority or switch sides.
The Accountant’s director, Gavin O’Connor, previously gave us the patriotic Miracle and the masculine Warrior. If Hollywood gets the message on The MessageTM, as Critical Drinker likes, O’Connor could have a very lucrative career ahead of him. If you want to support based filmmaking, see Accountant 2.
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