Same Again?

Hi, everyone! First off, I hope you enjoyed the What’s Worth Watching that showed up in your inboxes on Friday – it’s August, everybody’s hot and miserable, I figured you all deserved a taste of what I send to subscribers on the paid tier every Friday morning. If you enjoyed it and want to have that extra bump of recommendy goodness every week, it’s pretty easy to bump up your subscription! Five American dollars a month, or $50 annually. You’ll barely feel it, but I will know you’re enjoying what I’m doing, and that will be a nice thing to know. (And if you’re reading this on the web, sorry you missed out – but the free tier is available as well, to save you the click.)

And now to business, which is the business of familiarity. This week, CBC Radio’s Day 6 tapped me, along with Exclaim’s Rachel Ho and Slate’s Dana Stevens, for a panel about this summer movies, and how the biggest hits – with the exception of Zach Cregger’s delightfully creepy Weapons – have all been extensions of family-oriented IP. Sequels, reboots, live-action remakes, that sort of thing. The why of it is simple: People like to see things they already know they like, and whether the latest edition is actually good is sort of irrelevant to the studios. Sometimes you get a movie that reinterprets a given story from an unexpected angle. Sometimes you just get more of the same. And sometimes you get less.

Which brings me to two of this week’s new releases: The Accountant 2 and How to Train Your Dragon. Both of them exist because their predecessors are recognizable brands – though I’ll allow The Accountant 2 is not for families.

The Accountant 2 is what the kids call Dudes Rock cinema, like Miani Vice or the Den of Thieves pictures, where male bonding and high-powered weapons take precedence above all other narrative elements. In retrospect Gavin O’Connor’s original 2016 thriller fits that classification as well; I’d originally contextualized its story about a fastidious CPA who also happens to be a near-unstoppable assassin as a mash-up of the Bourne movies and Good Will Hunting, with Affleck’s casting as the dead-eyed Christian Wolff almost functioning as a meta-joke, but now I realize it occupies a different genre space.

Arriving between the first two John Wick pictures, before that series escalated into a mythology-heavy action fantasy, O’Connor’s movie is more in the Jack Reacher mode of meat-and-potatoes action, with a hypercompetent hero (who is, thanks to autism, a genius at both mathematics and covert paramilitary tactics) taking on a string of villains who want him dead because he opened the wrong spreadsheet, or whatever.

It was pulp nonsense, but O’Connor played it straight and the studio could afford an A-list cast, with Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons and Jon Bernthal all turning up to play potential adversaries who scoff at our hero’s methods but eventually come to appreciate his Particular Set of Skills. Bernthal, who’d already been cast as Daredevil frenemy Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, made the biggest impression as Christian’s brother Braxton, who has channeled his neurodiversity into being The Best At Murder.

I am not a fan of The Accountant, but I can’t deny the property is eerily suited to our current moment, where entire production companies exist to churn out variations on “what if this ordinary person was a John Wick murderman.” Hell, Nobody 2 arrived in theatres last Friday … just four scant months behind The Accountant 2.

The Accountant 2 aims to be, and I am only sort of kidding, the Godfather Part II of the Accountant franchise, moving forward and backward through the story to tell us where Christian Wolff came from even as he faces a complex new threat. But the idea of giving the deliberately blank hero a semi-tragic backstory and a new challenge that lets him address and resolve his formative traumas is a little more than a movie like this can handle.

When her mentor is killed, top Treasury Department investigator Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) contacts Christian – now living in peaceful isolation, having evolved into his final form as Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man – to help unpack the case said mentor was working on, exposing both herself and Christian to the guys who whacked him and eventually leading Christian to reach out to Braxton (still cranky, still violent) for help taking down the whackers. Also, Daniella Pineda (from The Detour, the Jurassic World movies and Netflix’ Cowboy Bebop remake) is around as a twitchy assassin with ambiguous motives, and also amnesia.

What’s going on? Well, it turns out there’s an elaborate conspiracy afoot – one that manages to incorporate all the specifically American bugaboos of the moment. I wouldn’t so crass as to assume returning screenwriter Bill Dubuque simply Googled “what are people afraid of” sometime in 2022, but this story revolves around paramilitary child traffickers who specialize in abducting neurodivergent kids, and how clean-cut white guys with their own armories are the only chance of stopping them. It’s a Qanon wet dream; the only thing missing is the speculation that the kids were vaccinated against their parents’ wishes.

I don’t mean to imply that The Accountant 2 is a right-wing product; the people who make those movies would never have cast Addai-Robinson or Pineda, for one thing. It’s just cynically constructed out of familiar parts in an attempt to draw the same audience that really likes Jack Ryan and Reacher. I hope everybody got paid well, is all.

Now, if you want an IP extension that justifies its existence, let’s talk about How to Train Your Dragon, the first attempt by DreamWorks to horn in on Disney’s territory and remake one of its animated treasures in live-action. As someone who doesn’t see the point of these things unless the creators make the property fully their own, the way Alex Ross Perry and David Loughery did with the wonderful Pete’s Dragon, I was skeptical. But these things sell, so here we are.

Did the world need a live-action remake of Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois’ 2010 animated fantasy about a tribe of Vikings locked in a perpetual war with ferocious mythical beasties, and the misfits from either side whose friendship ends the conflict and saves both species? Probably not. The original is right there, and still fresh!

And yet.

Released by DreamWorks Animation on the heels of the aesthetic triumph of Kung-Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon was a genuine work of art, propelled by Jay Baruchel’s tender hesitancy as the human hero Hiccup and a magnificent creation in the dragon character he names Toothless – a mix of a dog’s loyalty, a cat’s puckishness and certain vocal inflections borrowed from the mischievous blue alien Sanders and DeBlois created for Lilo & Stitch. Two sequels built out the world of Berk and its dragons to an epic scale while still maintaining the bond between Hiccup and Toothless, and exploring how each character grew over the course of the trilogy. And it ended beautifully, which is also something one doesn’t often see with big studio franchises.

I guess that makes it easier to rationalize restarting the series in live-action; just follow the scripts and you’re guaranteed three more hits, right? The difference here is that DeBlois is directing the live-action version as well, and now he’s second-guessing the choices he made the first time around. This version of Berk is more diverse and more culturally coherent, having been built by Vikings from various tribes. DeBlois is just expanding his original concept of Berk as a colony of immigrants, which is something we’d discussed when I talked to him and Baruchel a few years back – though they both used Canada as their metaphor, bless ’em.

The dragons are still realized through CG, but the Vikings are live actors now, which makes even the biggest of them seem more fragile and vulnerable – which the production underscores by draping the warriors in increasingly preposterous battle garb, culminating in Hiccup’s macho father Stoick (Gerard Butler, who voiced the animated version of the character) laboring under some ninety pounds of wardrobe and weaponry.

Mason Thames’ Hiccup can’t help but seem small by comparison, and Nico Parker’s Astrid even more so. Of course, Astrid is mighty in spite of her size; Hiccup, not so much. But he’s sensitive, and that lets him realize the wounded creature he discovers in a quarry needs his help rather than his hate. And DeBlois uses the expanded running time of the remake to demonstrate the ways in which Hiccup’s friendship with Toothless radiates through all of Berk, changing everyone for the better. He got me. He’ll probably get you too; he’s pretty good at this, you know.

So no, this version of How to Train Your Dragon isn’t necessary per se. But as studio IP cash grabs go, it understands why people value the original and works to honor that in ways most of the others haven’t. The cast is uniformly great, veteran cinematographer Bill Pope has a lot of fun with the scale of the IMAX sequences, and John Powell’s score serves to create a fealty to the original productions. The 4K disc is a beauty, supplementing the split-format 2.39/1.90 presentation with enveloping Dolby Atmos audio.

The special features also make the argument that this project came from a really good place. As I mentioned on Bluesky earlier this week, the 45-minute documentary “Love and Legacy: Making How to Train Your Dragon” is shockingly good for a studio franchise extra, exploring the unique place this property holds in the hearts of its cast.

The animated How to Train Your Dragon was released in 2010 – just long enough ago to enrapture a cohort of children who are now old enough to play its heroes. This isn’t a case of an actor in their twenties or thirties playing the latest iteration of Batman or Spider-Man; these are children who literally grew up on the original animated films and can’t believe they get to run around the world of Berk for real. And then you turn around, and there’s Gerard Butler absolutely bursting with the same glee.

Everyone is genuinely committed to this project, and in an age of generic studio megaproductions that’s truly lovely to see. It’s clearly a polished version of the production – we never see a disagreement, let alone an argument – but it’s also obvious that the crew as well as the cast is delighted to be working on a project this weird. And it is weird; the animated movies are so cheerfully stylized and unrealistic that a live-action version feels almost destined to fail. That DeBlois pulled it off at all feels like a minor miracle.

The big doc is accompanied by three shorter pieces that drill deeper into specific aspects of the production: “Building Berk” looks at the production design, “Dreaming Up the Dragons” is all about the visual effects and “Fit for a Viking” explores the specific wardrobe designs for each character. Also included are DeBlois’ audio commentary, deleted scenes, a gag reel – and best of all, unfinished versions of two key sequences, “Forbidden Friendship” and “Test Drive.”

The first is the raw footage of Hiccup’s big bonding moment with Toothless, with Thames acting opposite head puppeteer Tom Wilton, performing the role holding a big creature head; the second is Hiccup and Toothless taking their first flight together, with footage of Thames in a green-screen environment, astride a sort of mechanical bull, playing alongside the finished version of the sequence, tracked with Powell’s musical score.

Like that alternate version of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes on Disney’s special edition, it’s a great way to appreciate just how much imagination goes into projects like this – and not just from the design team. The actors have to find a way to make it real to them in the moment, and Thames turns out to be a natural. You believe the kid can fly.

There are no special features on Warner's 4K disc of The Accountant 2, but the movie looks better than it does on streaming. I guess that's something.

The Accountant 2 is available in individual 4K and Blu-ray editions from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment. How to Train Your Dragon is now available in 4K/BD and BD/DVD combos from Universal Studios Home Entertainment.