REVIEW: An Evil Kevin James Takes on a Teen Girl in Entertaining Thriller Becky by Josh Bell

REVIEW: An Evil Kevin James Takes on a Teen Girl in Entertaining Thriller Becky –

All of the early attention for siege thriller Becky has focused on the incongruous image of comedian and frequent Adam Sandler collaborator Kevin James as a menacing neo-Nazi villain, complete with huge bushy beard, shaved head and prominent swastika tattoos. And while James does remarkably well as the movie’s main bad guy, it’s really The Haunting of Hill House’s Lulu Wilson as the title character who makes Becky work.

Overall, the plot is a fairly standard home invasion story, with a gang of escaped convicts led by Dominick (James) breaking into the remote vacation home where 13-year-old Becky is staying with her family. The filmmakers are never coy about whether Becky is going to prevail over her attackers. The movie opens with cops interrogating a bored-looking Becky, who feigns ignorance about the apparent carnage back at her family home. When the movie then flashes back two weeks, directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion cross-cut between Dominick strutting around a prison yard, arranging a surreptitious assassination, and Becky standing in her school hallway, indifferently watching as bullies pick on another kid. It’s clear from the start that there’s some sort of equivalency between the hardened criminal and the sullen teenager.

Becky has a chip on her shoulder following her mom’s death of cancer a year earlier, and she resents her dad Jeff (Joel McHale, who brings the right balance of condescension and charm) for moving on too quickly with a new girlfriend. As Dominick and his cronies are breaking out of a prison transport vehicle, Jeff and Becky are on their way to the lake house that Becky’s mother loved. When they arrive, Jeff has what he claims is only good news: He’s decided not to sell the lake house, and he and his girlfriend Kayla (Amanda Brugel) have gotten engaged. To Becky, the engagement is a betrayal of her mother’s memory, and she heads off to sulk.

Becky’s mean streak manifests not only in how she treats Jeff, Kayla and Kayla’s young son Ty (Isaiah Rockcliffe), but also in her casual shoplifting at a convenience store where she and her dad stop on the way to the house. There’s obviously more going on with her than just typical adolescent moodiness, and when Dominick shows up at the door pretending to be looking for a lost dog, she gets the chance to put her rage into action. It isn’t long before Dominick reveals his true intentions, tying up Jeff, Kayla and Ty in the living room, but Becky is out in the woods behind the house, stewing in anger inside her backyard fort.

The fort is just one of the movie’s many clever contrasts between Becky’s kid-oriented interests and her very adult appetite for vengeance. A kid’s sanctuary becomes a base of operations full of makeshift weapons, including a water gun-turned-flame thrower and a ruler sharpened into a prison-style shiv. Becky’s two large dogs — one friendly and one fierce — are named after Dora the Explorer characters. Before she heads into battle against her enemies, Becky stares herself down in a star-shaped mirror. That balance of cute and deadly is tough to pull off, but the filmmakers have a real asset in Wilson, who makes Becky into a believable threat against men who are at least three times her size.

There’s not much more to the plot than the face-off between Becky and Dominick’s gang, and Dominick’s motivation for invading the house, which is to locate a hidden key the purpose of which is never explained, is largely irrelevant. Wilson and James make for worthy adversaries, and while James isn’t exactly a revelation in his first substantial dramatic role, he gives Dominick the right amount of edge. Even when threatening his hulking henchman Apex (Robert Maillet), who towers over him, Dominick always comes across as the man in control.

That’s why his undoing at the hands of this unassuming young girl is so satisfying. With her single-minded fury and resourceful use of household items, Becky is a cross between John Wick and Home Alone’s Kevin McCallister. Milott and Murnion compensate for the somewhat rudimentary story by piling on the gore, and the violence is so gleefully over-the-top that it becomes almost comical. The action may be a little slow to get going, but by the time a character is using a kitchen knife to cut off their own dangling eyeball, the movie has fully committed to its brand of inventive ultraviolence.

There isn’t much more to Becky than that, but it’s enough to keep the movie consistently entertaining beyond the gimmick of seeing Paul Blart as a neo-Nazi fighting a pint-sized female Rambo. The pacing is brisk, the makeup effects are effectively stomach-churning, and the directors (who previously made horror-comedy Cooties and small-scale action movie Bushwick) come up with some creative shot compositions, especially in the tense stand-offs between Becky and Dominick. If it took a little stunt casting to get audiences to pay attention to Becky, then the risk was worth it.

Starring Lulu Wilson, Kevin James, Joel McHale, Robert Maillet, Amanda Brugel and Isaiah Rockcliffe, Becky opens Friday on VOD and in select drive-in theaters.

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This story was originally featured at https://www.cbr.com/an-evil-kevin-james-takes-on-a-teen-girl-in-entertaining-thriller-becky/