R-rated Home Alone antics just awful Review
Becky (R18, 94 mins) Directed by Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion Reviewed by
I★★ t’s a fine line between ‘‘exciting genre piece’’ and ‘‘meanspirited exploitative drivel’’, and to be fair to the makers of Becky, they navigate that line prettywell.
But, that doesn’t exactly solve the problem that the film does spend at least half its time on the exact wrong side of that line.
And that even when it does cross back over into ‘‘exciting genre piece’’ territory, it still doesn’t establish anything like enough wit or insight to even begin to excuse what we have just watched.
So although I appreciate just as much as the next viewer, the sight of a plucky and unsinkable teenage girl taking on a gang of whitesupremacist home invaders and gruesomely dispatching them oneby-one, I’m still unconvinced that all the dangling eyeballs, execution by outboard motor and kickinga-sharpened-steel-ruler-througha-throat scenes are entirely worth sitting through, forwhat is essentially just a Home Alone
remakewith an R-rating, rather than a truly smart You’re Next- style reboot of the entire genre.
Leading the charge against the baddies is Lulu Wilson ( Annabelle: Creation), as the Becky of the title.
After a setup straight out of a ‘‘my first thriller script’’ fridge magnet set, during whichwe learn that Becky’smumdied a few years ago, and now dad is about to marry his new girlfriend, Becky is as surprised as anyone to realise that a nasty gang of chubby middleaged skinheads have broken into the family’s pile by the lake and are now torturing her dad to reveal the whereabouts of a mysterious key.
After which, Becky devolves into a series of gory and mostly pretty witless set pieces, as our hero lures the gang into blundering into her homemade traps and pitfalls.
The best thing about Becky, by far, is the lead turn from Wilson. The worstmight be the distractingly unlikely casting of Kevin James ( Paul Blart: Mall Cop (No, really) as the lead baddie.
Even sporting the classic ‘‘beard-and-a-shaved-head’’ doover, James still looks like your dodgy uncle at worst and asking us to believe he’s a psychopathic, dogshooting, white-supremacist killer is more than just a bridge too far.
It pushes Becky into laughingout-loud-for-all-the-wrong-reasons territory.
On a quiet night, with a few mates and a shed load of beers, Becky might just about scrub up as the Hannah Montana-goes-Rambo the trailer is promising.
But really, just say nah. There’s amillion films like Becky out there, and most of them are about a hundred times better than this.