Are Those Movies in Which Ben Affleck Plays an Autistic Killer Offensive … or Just Kind of Great?

When I think of autism “representation” that reflects my own experience as an autistic diagnosis—Dale Cooper, Data, Alan Grant, Yakko Warner, Paulie Walnuts, David Byrne (specifically David Byrne in True Stories ), Bob Dylan in the Must Be Santa music video, and Goku—I rarely think of characters or texts where the disorder is explicitly named, or even alluded to. If you can say one thing about the spectrum with any certainty, it's that it's slippery and a little amorphous—you grab at your version of it wherever, and whenever, you can. But the versions presented in works that claim to home in on the autistic experience with intentionality often make the mistake of being clinically specific, in a way that leaves its autistic character feeling more like an anthropomorphized passage from the DSM than a fully realized being. Characters like Shaun Murphy in The Good Doctor are so cringe, they find me practicing eye contact for prolonged periods alone in my room so that I can't be found aspy by association. There's an earnestness to these well-intentioned portrayals that have infused the popular notion of “autistic identity” with corniness, stemming from a failure by neurotypical creators to understand something willingly about realizing autism in their works: The autistic experience isn't so much a matter of content, but form.

The 2016 action thriller The Accountant , starring Ben Affleck, and its newly released sequel The Accountant 2 , by contrast, make up a surprisingly successful depiction of autistic ways of being. These honest, if goofy, tributes to the autistic experience treat being on the spectrum not as a disability, but as a weapon—a refreshing and, frankly, fun take at a time when autism is increasingly being demonized in the public sphere.

The Accountant , written by Bill Dubuque and directed by Gavin O'Connor, admittedly does run head-first, stimming , into some of the problems common to cliché representations of autism. Affleck plays Christian Wolff, a high-functioning autistic CPA who moonlights for the world's most dangerous criminal organizations to help them cook their books—while also covertly tipping off the feds to their goings-on. He happens to also be a super-warrior assassin, raised since boyhood by an ex-military-psy-ops father to be a killing machine who is at one point forced to unleash Indonesian martial art Pencak Silat on his likely scarred-for-life 12-year-old bullies.

Wolff's autism is central to both the plot and his characterization. It is depicted as a semi-torturous superpower (as autism often is) that allows him to crack insanely baroque tax-fraud puzzles, but also railroads him onto revenge plots fueled by a compulsive need to “finish the puzzle.” It is a dour, regularly grim, only occasionally tongue-in-cheek (when Anna Kendrick is on screen, at least) portrayal of autism, sitting within an overstuffed mid-tier action film that is as silly as it is self-serious.

And yet, upon rewatching The Accountant recently, I found myself oddly moved by its examination of autistic loneliness. Sure, it is given a baby's-first-Travis-Bickle treatment, but within its depiction of the relationship between Wolff and his equally deadly, if infinitely more charming, younger brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal), is a gently honest approach to the quintessentially autistic experience of “Sorry, I'm doing my best.”

But where this relationship is only really explored in the final moments of The Accountant , The Accountant 2 , which was released in theaters on April 25 and will eventually stream on Amazon Prime, wisely gives itself over to it, trading the first film's sluggish sternness for a cheekier riff on the autistic-plus-neurotypical-buddy-cop dynamic. With Bernthal to bounce off, Affleck has room to transform Wolff from a one-note, cliché, autistic robot into a real-enough (the reality of these films being unequivocally bonkers) person who just happens to be autistic.

In this way, the sequel approaches the often comic nature of intimate autistic and non-autistic relationships with something approaching joyousness. There's a scene at the film's midpoint where its labyrinthine plot detailing cartel conspiracies and human trafficking and super-assassins—the film revolves around the hunt for the killer of a prominent character from the first film—throws its hands up, as if to say “Hey, we don't really know what's going on, either,” and decides to let its overstimulated audience take a breath. Braxton convinces Christian to head out for drinks. The film all but opens with Christian rigging the algorithm of a speed-dating night, then proceeding to whiff 50-ish dates with his autistically blunt vibes (been there, brother!), as much of the movie focuses on Christian's attempts to “fit in” and forge community in a society that makes that all but impossible. But, out with his rambunctious, BDE-imbued little bro at a honky-tonk LA saloon, Christian finds himself mesmerized by, then memorizing, the line-dancing steps, then joining in beside the hot waitress he awkwardly hit on, to Braxton's enthusiastic encouragement—“That's my big brother up there!”

It's a warm scene following an earlier, quieter exchange when the brothers reunite. It turns out they haven't seen each other since the events of the last film, which ended with Christian's promise to keep in contact—a turn of events that I, embarrassingly, found extremely sad. Braxton, the very picture of a man's man mercenary, has tears in his eyes as he asks his older brother outright: “Is it because of you or because of me?” Christian looks confused, and Braxton elaborates: “You just don't, like … miss me. Is that because of you or me? Is it because of … y'know … your condition?” to which Christian replies, gently: “I’m just me.”

It is a sweet little moment in an otherwise grisly film that has more Mozambique Drills than Rain Man has autistic tics. You should not tear up watching The Accountant 2 , but heck, I did: I know what it is to want to meet the neurotypical world halfway, to apologize for inadequately letting a loved one know just how deeply you love them, for misunderstanding the social cues at a shoot-out. The Accountant franchise gets at these true autistic experiences by way of John Grisham, but hell, I'll take it.

But where The Accountant 2 truly blossoms into an autistic text is in its awkward, inscrutable clunk. Its secondary villain is an acquired scientist who essentially gained super-autism via a head injury. The franchise's “ guy (or gal) in the chair ” trope—Christian's childhood friend, a nonverbal autistic named Justine (the autistic actor Allison Robertson, recast from Alison Wright, who still provides Justine's voice)—is now a Professor by children on the spectrum) as they hack military drones and change the LA traffic lights to a highway of green for Christian to race through.