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Writer/Director Celine Song first got my attention with 2023's "Past Lives," a beautifully crafted film that received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. "Materialists" offers a similar level of thoughtful dialogue, wry humor and insight into the human condition.

Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a NYC matchmaker. While attending the wedding of one of her clients, Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a six-foot, handsome private equity investor who checks nearly all of her boxes. But wait! John (Chris Evans), her struggling-actor ex, is working as a server at the same event. John offers perfect hair, attentiveness and a total devotion to Lucy. (Did I mention the hair?) Obviously, the lady has some choices to make. Lucy moves in with Harry, but she turns to John during her times of greatest vulnerability.

Song's script is uneven, but still inspired. Fortunately, the story never threatens to spend much time in typical rom-com territory. In fact, Song seems to enjoy playing with several rom-com tropes. There are the obligatory scenes of ordinary people expressing their romantic expectations. But instead of a speed-dating setting, these are clients being interviewed by Lucy, who occasionally offers some clear-eyed feedback. After one client has presented Lucy with her multi-page, typed list of bullet points that describe her modest expectations for a suitable spouse, Lucy responds: "All I can hope to find for you is a man who can tolerate you for the next fifty years, who likes you at all." There also are multiple references to men having surgery on their legs to become up to six inches taller.

As the film's name foreshadows, Song is clear that, for many, marriage is as much a business decision as it is a choice inspired by true love. But even this mercenary spirit is tempered by a sense of humanity. At one point, Lucy confesses that she likes Harry "because you make me feel valuable," offering a charming shift in perspective on the nature of their transactional relationship.

There are a few imperfections. The film includes a major digression into the travails of Lucy's client Sophie (Zoe Winters). Although there's an ultimate payoff to this subplot, several of the related scenes slow the film's momentum. Finally, there's Lucy/Dakota Johnson. Although the script requires her character to be emotionally detached, I spent the film trying to figure out whether Johnson was compellingly in-character or just an actor with a limited emotional range. (Anyone who is even vaguely aware of the "50 Shades" franchise should be permitted similar misgivings.)

Because Song is willing to take risks and clearly has something to say, I was rooting for "Materialists." As the film progressed, I wondered how she would eventually land the plane. From my perspective, Song comes in for a smooth, satisfying landing.

To understand "Friendship," you need to know a little about Tim Robinson's body of work. Viewers have a love/hate relationship with his current Netflix series, "I Think You Should Leave." Fans see him as a comic genius who has stretched the boundaries of "cringe comedy." Other viewers find Robinson's unhinged, self-indulgent characters insufferable. I'm in the second group.

"Cringe comedy" centers on a socially awkward character whose lack of self-awareness gets the person into increasingly embarrassing situations. Early examples of this comedic form include "The Colbert Report," "The Office" and "Da Ali G Show." "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and shows like "The Studio" have further honed the art form. For me, what differentiates these other shows from Robinson's work is that they include redemptive elements, an identifiable humanity, in the protagonist. In "The Studio," Seth Rogan is the new CEO of a film studio and also a bottomless pit of need. But he has flashes of self-awareness and generally understands when he's really stepped in it (although usually after the fact). Rogan has a priceless scene where he literally begs Zoe Kravitz to mention him in her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes because his mother will be watching and he's desperate for her approval of his career choice. It's the consummate example of a cringe situation leavened with enough humanity to be interesting, comedic and dramatic.

"Friendship" offers none of this balance. In the character of Craig Waterman, Robinson clearly intended to portray a character who has no appealing features to offset his essential jerkiness. Mission accomplished. The problem, though, is that Craig's persistently unlikable nature totally undermines the basic elements of an already-thin plot. For example, why would a smart, attractive woman like his wife Tami (played by a long-suffering Kate Mara) be with this idiot? The extreme nature of Robinson's character forces the entire film to become a tenuous chain of comedy bits, not a well-crafted storyline that merits discussion. There's no character development, no forward momentum and no epiphanies. All the characters remain unchanged from the beginning of the film until its merciful conclusion. "Friendship" is just Robinson being a self-absorbed narcissist in a variety of settings - ostracized at the office (where his job is to make people addicted to the products he's hired to market), "bonding" with a new male friend (Paul Rudd) during garage get-togethers or occasionally interacting with his family, which includes a son who dotes on his mom while simply ignoring Craig. Because Craig is so lacking in self-awareness, his jokes don't land, he never fits in and he limps through life riding an ever-increasing wave of self-delusion as things escalate out of control.

Wandering around in this hot mess is the message that men are sometimes sad, often lonely and frequently isolated. But the plot here doesn't have enough heft to actually develop that thought.

"Friendship," and Robinson, clearly have a devoted following. During the screening I attended, there were audible chuckles and outright laughter from several of the other moviegoers. I spent the next two hours wondering why.

Sequels for uninspired films seem to be a Hollywood staple - "Bad Santa 2," "Speed 2," "Dumb and Dumber To," "The Suicide Squad" (as distinct from "Suicide Squad"). You get the idea. "The Accountant 2" offers definitive proof that a lousy original film usually should be buried, not artificially resuscitated.

Ray King (JK Simmons) has been hired to find a missing Salvadoran family. After meeting with one of his contacts, he's shot dead outside a bar. Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), King's protégé and the current Director of FinCEN, discovers that King wrote "find the accountant" on his forearm before he died. The Accountant is Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), an autistic auditor more comfortable with numbers than with people. Wolff and his homicidal brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) agree to help Medina find the missing family. Predictably, they leave a trail of dead bad guys in their wake.

Apparently, the producers of this film expended a lot of effort to get the original cast, director and writer back together. Unfortunately, nobody expended any energy creating a decent plot or reasonable characters for the reconstituted group. "The Accountant 2" is a hot mess.

The central problem here is that this film never decides what it wants to be. Affleck and Bernthal have enough chemistry for this to have been a fun, breezy buddy/action film. But instead of focusing on the dynamic between these brothers, the narrative dives into so many digressions and subplots that it was easy for the moviegoer to lose focus, if not consciousness. There are multiple scenes involving Harbor Neuroscience, a facility that harbors a collection of autistic kids with the ability to hijack any computer anywhere. Whenever the plot goes completely off the rails, the Harbor kids are employed as deus ex machina. We learn that Anaïs, an assassin who met with King in the opening scene, has "acquired savant syndrome." She was apparently a mild-mannered wife and mother until a head injury during an auto accident turned her into an incredibly skilled, highly motivated killing machine. Why this matters is anybody's guess. There are also scenes of Christian Wolff at a speed dating event, where women have lined up to meet him because he's hacked the database to make his profile more attractive. (He alienates all the women in short order when interacting face-to-face.) A scene involving Wolff as a first-time line dancer at a cowboy bar in LA is thrown in for no apparent reason. In an unrelated development, all of Christian's anxieties, quirks, obsessions and inhibitions magically disappear in the scenes where he picks up an automatic weapon and starts randomly killing bad guys with a newly developed macho swagger.

I'd have willingly given this script a pass if the film had just declared itself to be a summer action flick where suspending our disbelief was the price for enjoying an afternoon of mindless mayhem. But because the film's intentions were so obscure and the storyline was so scattershot, minor flaws in the story became major obstacles for me. Is it a goal of this film to advocate for autism? Is this just a vanity project where we are supposed to admire Affleck as he demonstrates his self-awareness by parodying his leading man persona? At the end of the day, this Accountant just doesn't add up.