‘Becky’
The anger management issues that our 13year old heroine contends with in the gritty home invasion thriller “Becky” (*** OUT OF **** ) may surprise as well as shock you. In this graphic, suspenseful, often profane, Rrated, 93-minute melodrama, a despicable goon squad of escaped White Supremacist convicts meet their match in the figure of a pubescent 13year old girl whose mom has just died from cancer. Indisputably, she is still distraught about her mom’s death, and her clueless father aggravates matters when he surprises Becky with his plans to wed his new African-american girlfriend. Now, Becky has an adolescent step-brother to look forward to once they are married. The eponymous heroine, Becky Hooper (Lulu Wilson of “Ready Player One”), hasn’t recovered sufficiently from her mom’s demise to sympathize with her father’s urgency to start afresh with a new wife. As far as Becky is concerned, her father’s rush to the altar amounts to blasphemy! She remembers strumming a guitar in her mother’s hospital room. So overwrought was she by her daughter’s performance, she had to stop her from playing. Meantime, Becky can neither forget her dead mom nor excuse her father’s audacity to replace her mom without her permission. Nope, dad didn’t think this one out, and Becky winds up hating him with a passion. When things couldn’t possibly get any worse, White Supremacists show up at their lake house, looking for a wooden key one had left in their basement. Indeed, these dudes don’t have a clue about Becky. By the time they get a clue, each’s expiration date has passed.
“Becky” opens with our troubled teenage heroine sitting nervously in an interview with a thirtysomething sheriff’s deputy and a social worker. She doesn’t say much when they inquire about the home invasion. Nevertheless, Becky remembers vividly some of those alarming moments. In a way, “Becky” is somewhat anti-climactic, because we know our heroine survived the traumatic events about to be chronicled. Co-directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion, who helmed “Cooties” (2014) with Elijah Wood and later “Bushwick” (2017) with Dave Bautista and Brittany Snow, display only a modicum of restraint in their depiction of grisly violence. By comparison, “Becky” makes the classic revenge thriller “Death Wish” (1974) starring Charles Bronson look tame. Of course, it’s different when a juvenile heroine puts the bad guys to death.
The convicts in “Becky” are stereotypical bigots. Two weeks earlier, before they invaded the Hooper’s lakeside house, these racist dastards participated in the stabbing murder of an African-american inmate in a prison yard. Later, the four managed to escape during an inmate transfer. No, the filmmakers don’t show how they subdued their two heavily armed guards. The leader of the bunch, Dominick (Kevin James of “Paul Blart: Mall Cop”), belongs t0 an arm of the Aryan Brotherhood. The cretins with him as just as evil. Dominick is an older, bald, obese Caucasian, with a huge, bushy, black beard. Prominently tattooed to the back of his clean-shaven noggin is a giant Nazi swastika.
These suspicious characters show up at the Hooper’s lake house. Dominick lies about having lost his pet dog. Actually, he is there to root out a key. By this time, Becky and her father Jeff (Joel Mchale of “Assassination Nation”) have stopped talking. Furthermore, she wants nothing to do with either Jeff’s girlfriend, Kayla (Amanda Brugel of “Jason X”), or her son, Ty (newcomer Isaiah Rockcliffe) at the lakeside residence. Plunging into the woods like a renegade, she holes up in a sturdy fort with a pit bull named Diego. When neither Jeff nor Kayla knows anything about this mysterious key, Dominick suspects they are lying. He doesn’t have time to waste on these antics, so he shoots Kayla in the thigh without warning. Afterward, he tries to reason with Jeff to do everything he can to reach Becky. Meantime, Dominick finds Becky’s phone and launches a manhunt to find her. He sends out his henchmen to locate her. He knows she cannot be far away. He knows, too, that she lied about calling the cops. You’ll love the incident
that finally elicits a response from local law enforcement.
As it turns out, Becky can take care of herself. She improvises, resorting to basic garden tools and writing implements to annihilate her adversaries. She turns into a sadistic “Macgyver” girl. She devises booby-traps. She catches her prey. She does horrible things to them. They die. She drowns a thug in a pond with an outboard motor churning his face into hamburger. She gouges Dominick’s eye out. When he collapses in the kitchen, his right eyeball wobbles out of its socket on its sinewy tether across the counter like a rubber ball attached to a paddle. Desperately, Dominick struggles to catch it. Incredibly, he recovers and has his own anger management Armageddon. Channeling “John Wick,” Becky saves the best for the hooligan who shot her poor dog full of holes. For good measure, he dies with a splintered, foot-long, kindergarten ruler sticking either way out of his neck with inches to spare! When she commits all these murders, straight-faced Becky is dressed in an absurd looking child’s knit cap with ears, eyes, and nose, and with tie cords dangling in front.
Apart from Lulu Wilson’s electrifying performance as the revenge-driven Becky, Kevin James deserves recognition for his villainous turn as Dominick. Some may not even recognize him. He looks nothing like he did in all his previous movies and both television sit-coms. Honestly, despite being an offensive character, Dominick doesn’t utter the kind of soul-eroding profanity that such a lout would spout. Nevertheless, he makes a malevolent jailbird who deserves his just comeuppance. Scenarists Nick Norris of “The Evil Eye,” and Ruckus Skye & Lane Skye of “Devil to Pay” have penned a preposterous but engrossing paean to female empowerment as a cathartic revenge fantasy. “Becky” ends where it began. The deputy and the social worker fear the effect of the killings on her mental state. Smell a sequel?
“Becky” is available as Redbox, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and most other streaming services that broadcast R-rated material.