Mark Reviews Movies: BECKY (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 4, 2020

It makes some sense that Becky (Lulu Wilson) would try to fight back against the men who take away everything she has. It makes a lot less sense that this 14-year-old girl would suddenly, without any apparent history of psychological issues, transform into a killer, quickly coming up with deranged and elaborate ways of inflicting as much bodily destruction as possible.

Obviously, something snaps in the eponymous protagonist of Becky. We can buy that. As for the degree of abject depravity and violence that comes with the breakdown, one either buys it or doesn't. The filmmakers certainly don't help us accept the transformation.

They might be trying. Take the movie's opening scenes, which juxtapose Becky's day-to-day life with that of the man against whom she'll eventually confront. The man is Dominick, played by Kevin James in act of extreme contra-typecasting, a neo-Nazi currently serving a stint in prison of unknown length for an unspecified crime.

Screenwriters Nick Morris and the married pair of Lane and Ruckus Skye seem to go out of their way to undermine the threat of this character. We first see him in the prison yard, walking past a brawl, as he hands a blade to a fellow inmate, who proceeds to stab someone. Meanwhile, Becky is at school, where another fight—of which she has and apparently wants no part—is underway. The editing tells us there's a connection. The visuals convince us otherwise.

The storytelling is just as inconsistent throughout directors' Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion's movie. To quickly arrive at the main thrust of the plot, Dominick and his right-hand man Apex (Robert Maillet) escape from a prison transport vehicle. Dominick kills a man to get his car. There's the strong implication that the fugitives killed two kids in the backseat, but the filmmakers evade anything beyond the suggestion—again, undermining how evil these villains actually are.

Meanwhile, Becky and her widower father Jeff (Joel McHale), as well as their two dogs, arrive at the family's summer home in the woods. Jeff's girlfriend Kayla (Amanda Brugel) and her young son Ty (Isaiah Rockcliffe) also arrive. Jeff and Kayla tell Becky they're planning to marry, and the girl, still mourning her mother's death, runs off to her fort in the forest.

That's when Dominick, Apex, and two other goons (played by Ryan McDonald and James McDougall) knock on the door and take hostages. Dominick is looking for a special key that he hid in the cellar (Don't ask what it does or how it got there, since the screenwriters keep it a pure, albeit confusingly convenient, MacGuffin).

The rest of the story, as one might expect, is a game of cat-and-mouse between Becky, who has the key, and the neo-Nazi gang. The twist is that Becky, shattered by a pair of deaths in the aftermath of the home invasion, becomes the aggressor—taking rather grisly vengeance against Dominick's thugs on her path to killing the man who started it all.

There are a few issues here, and the least of them is that Becky uses the time in which she could have run to a neighbor's house to call the cops in order to exact her revenge (Ignoring the opportunity means the assault is a deliberate choice on the character's part). There is the issue that Dominick—especially—and his goons—as close runners-up—aren't exactly an intellectual threat against the girl. Maybe that's part of the filmmakers' twisted joke—that these neo-Nazis, whose hateful ideology is shrouded in metaphors (once again, undermining their wickedness), are just plain stupid in every conceivable way. The result, though, is a subtly escalating problem in the storytelling: If their violence and beliefs and intelligence are consistently minimized, where is this group's threat?

That issue compounds the movie's primary one, which is the portrayal of Becky as a ruthless and demented killer. Almost all of the violence here—and most of it that is actually shown, too—is enacted by the protagonist, and all of that particular violence is gruesome in an over-the-top way. After dressing in her warrior garb (a chipmunk stocking hat), Becky stabs a henchmen with a ruler and proceeds to stomp on it until the measuring tool comes out the other side of his neck. She sets booby traps for another, before decimating his torso with an outboard motor. There's more, of course, but what's the point of describing them after those two examples?

This is clearly meant to satisfying on a primal level, but the filmmakers have severely miscalculated how much their diminishment of the antagonists' villainy affects that goal. Becky comes across as less a story of righteous vengeance and more the story of the birth of a sociopath.

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