THE WRATH OF BECKY - Mark Reviews Movies

The Wrath of Becky, Quiver Distribution

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 25, 2023

With its main character established and unapologetically treated as the unhinged threat she became in the first movie, The Wrath of Becky is a better movie than its predecessor. Whatever promise that notion might hold, though, is undermined by a thin and hasty exercise in vengeance-fueled carnage that comes to an end just when it really starts to get interesting.

The premise here has Becky (Lulu Wilson) trying to live a life on her own three years after surviving an attack by neo-Nazis at her family's summer home in the woods. Going and escaping from a few foster homes in between periods of self-reliance with her trusty dog, the orphaned 16-year-old has found something akin to a home with Elena (Denise Burse), a kind older woman who doesn't pry into the teen's past because she seems to have a good head on her shoulders.

Obviously, we know that Becky has some—let's call them—unresolved anger issues, stemming from an overactive imagination, a strong sense of retaliation, and the trauma of watching her father be murdered and nearly being killed herself by that gang of hateful thugs a few years back. If the girl's bloody acts of self-defense in the previous movie often made her seem more like a sociopath than a desperate child doing all that she could to survive, newcomer directors Matt Angel, who also penned the screenplay, and Suzanne Coote take what felt like an unlikely development and run with it in the sequel. That's the right decision, if only because it is, well, the only move the filmmakers could make after the preceding story.

It doesn't matter how Becky got to this mindset, because that's who she is now. While working a shift at a local diner, Becky imagines herself breaking a plate and slashing the throat of a customer who dares to disrespect her, despite her warnings not to do so. The first movie felt iffy about who Becky was and never quite made a convincing case that she could or would do all of the brutal violence she performed. Almost immediately, though, Angel and Coote let us know they have a firm handle on this character's personality and capacity for violence. It makes a big difference, but so, too, does the fact that Wilson clearly has grown into the physicality and attitude of this character in the intervening years.

The plot is something of a rehash of the previous movie, in that Becky once again must confront a group of far-right extremists, although the filmmakers this time have a bit more realism with which to work—unfortunately for the state of the country and political discourse. Her adversaries in this installment are called the Noble Men, a cult-like group of reactionaries who hold public rallies, look for trouble with political opponents and the police, and put on a relatively innocent display of broad patriotism while having the very real motive of white supremacy. Angel isn't hiding the real-world correlations of this fictional group, and that adds to the sense of threat.

Anyway, the plot, after Becky "accidentally" spills some coffee on one of the members, has three of the Noble Men invading our protagonist's home with fatal consequences. She tracks down the men to a remote cabin by a lake, where Becky also learns of a plan to infiltrate a town hall meeting and assassinate a left-wing U.S. Senator. She wasn't going to let the first debt go unpaid, but after discovering just how dangerous this group is, Becky isn't going to overlook any of the others, either.

After spending time becoming acquainted with the newly improved Becky, there is an unfortunate rush to get to the standoff in Angel's screenplay, which takes a few too many shortcuts to get to its gory action. The scrappy ingenuity of the character using whatever she was close by in the first movie, for example, is replaced by a veritable arsenal housed in a convenient barn, which Becky conveniently stumbles upon after learning about the assassination plot.

Everything she could need or want for an assault—from firearms, to a crossbow, to assorted grenades—is right there. In other words, it's really just a matter of the filmmakers coming up with gruesome deaths by way of these weapons, as well as using some editing trickery to bypass the logistics of, say, how Becky retrieves a grown man from a pit and tapes something inside his mouth.

As for the villains, they're a threatening but limited bunch, although the presence of comic actor Seann William Scott as the group's leader is a seemingly counterintuitive but effective piece of casting. He's a menacing presence here—surely more so than the four other Noble Men, who clearly exist in this story just to increase the movie's body count.

That's really the main point, after all, and compared to the original movie, there is something a bit more righteously satisfying about the confrontation in The Wrath of Becky, with its solid understanding of the demented protagonist and a group of villains who come across as more than cartoon-like threats. Still, this entry feels like a stepping stone for what's to come, but at least it's generally in the right direction.

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