2 out of 5

Directed by: Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion

I’ve looked at three different posters for this movie, and all three are pitching a genre – thriller; violent action; 80s throwback – that whiff on the movie’s tone. …Which is not the poster creator’s fault, necessarily, as Becky’s struggle, from top to bottom, is its own confusion about its tone.

There are likely a handful of elevator pitches for this thing, but let’s settle on: Home Alone with The Good Son; an imperfect take but, I think, captures some of the spirit that occasionally alights upon the script or visuals. But before we get there, we have about an hour of character drama and home invasion to get through: Becky (Lulu Wilson) and her Dad, Jeff (Joel McHale), are driving to their family lakehouse in disquiet, their relationship rocky ever since the passing of their mother / wife. Becky reflects in flashbacks; Jeff wants to talk about moving on.

Meanwhile, intercut in “we’re all the same” snippets, Nazi (Dominick) Kevin James is staging a jailbreak, subsequently killing his way towards…

Becky is out in her childhood clubhouse in the woods, not present for when Dominick and several of his “brothers” ring the doorbell of the lakehouse, and seclude Jeff and his girlfriend (who is – Nazi in the house, recall – not white), demanding the location of a key, which just so happens to be in Becky’s possession. Cue a montage of arming-herself-with-stabby-doodads zooms and Becky setting up various forest-bound traps, then taking on Dominick and his crew, one by one. Things get nice and bloody.

Setting aside our antagonists’ introductions, the leadup to all of this, about half of its 90 minute runtime, is solid. It’s definitely not a story we haven’t seen before, but Wilson really commits to her role, and McHale and Amanda Brugel, playing his girlfriend, are both very giving and patient as supporting actors; they form a very believable family unit, and there’s nice room in the script and scene direction to allow for humanity, and not necessarily tell the audience how they should feel.

But the intercuts of James’ side of the story are a mismatch, despite the editing wanting to be clever and having Dominick’s / Lulu’s actions mirror one another. Now, sure, that’s perhaps part of the purposeful genre mashup that’s being played with, but it feels instead like pickup shots edited in. The whole Nazi bit is also a wash, completely pointless to the character and more a lazy crutch to make it super okay to inflict violence upon him / them, and give Dom’s crew a lame “brotherhood” reason to stick together, despite shit going very wrong. There are the briefest dialogue snippets of mentioning how this sought after key ties into Fourth Reich-style plans, but the presence of Brugel has that same “fix it in post” vibe – like, shit, we cast a non-Aryan looking actress; we should probably say something about it – because, otherwise, these are not very rhetoric-spewing hatemongers. More on the direction of that in a moment, though.

The above pointlessness is compounded by the Nazi bit being a double reveal: they do it once via a tattoo reveal, at the start, to show how mean and racist Dominick is; then later, when James is confronting Brugel, the characters does the same reveal – to the fucking camera, not her – and there’s the sense that that could’ve been a good beat. …Except, y’know, we did it already.

Triply compounding the lack of threat was the decision to keep the key quest MacGuffin-ized: we don’t know what it does, and we’re only vaguely told. Unfortunately, we’re undertold: the key hardly feels like it’s worth the effort, and its byzantine design is not that of a deposit box or something, i.e. not something the audience easily knows cannot be broken in to. It looks like a fantasy item. Keep that in a small collection of “maybe this is the genre?” nods.

We’ll skip around the many logic gaps in Dominick’s plan, except to say that a better film would’ve juxtaposed his threat with his incapability, and Becky’s filmmakers – and James – play up neither.

Now: James. I’m pro on this casting. He’s got a great beard for the film, and can do a fair menacing stare. But man, the directors just left the actor swimming, or were telling him that this was a straight up drama – that’s the note everyone gets; Act! – which just makes his presence dishwater tepid. And costuming sticks him in this okey-doke hoody that’s a bit too chill. I’ll give the movie credit for its willingness to rack up some kills, and not shy away from physical violence upon Becky, and there’s another possible good film there, that’s a bit more vicious – a revenge flick, leaning upon its family drama buildup for tension.

But again stitched into / on top of that are those Sam Raimi zooms, and some gore overkill that’s of a (seriously) Terrifier or Dead Alive low-budget vibe: not enough cash to necessarily do the gags straight, but you get some good makeup and dummies and splash blood on your characters while stabbings galore are happening. I mean, Terrifier did do stuff in camera, though, while Becky accomplishes its gore off screen, but it still “goes there” with its kills, implying a B-movie version of this, and the score picks up on that a bit with some synthwave flair.

And yet, visuals aside, the actors are still kinda playing it straight, and the script is maybe written to still be a character drama, and the DP had already settled on that sad, summertime glaze to the movie’s colors, and the editor is trying to make all of these different movies play together…

They don’t. Good ideas and intentions abound in Becky, and as long as we’re mostly sticking to an A-story and straight-down-the-middle tone, the movie is working. But we hit a clear turning point, and then there’s no righting things before the end credits.