Becky

It's fun seeing an actor play against type. Henry Fonda in Once Upon A Time In The West. Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast. Charlize Theron in Monster (okay this one was not fun but she was great). Albert Brooks in Drive. Even if they aren't always successful or believable the results are still interesting. With Becky we get Kevin James. The big lovable funny guy from King Of Queens plays a neo nazi here. Paul Blart with a swastika tattooed on the back of his head. Yup.

There's a scene abut halfway through Becky where a bad guy gets a sharpened school ruler rammed into his neck, then he's stabbed in the face multiple times by a load of pencils that have been taped together and finally he gets the ruler stamped right through his neck. In bloody closeup. It may seem like overkill but this guy shot a dog dead earlier. A lovely dog. The number one rule of films is the dog always survives. So he got what was coming to him. And then some. If you can stomach this particularly gruesome moment then you'll enjoy Becky. If not, go away and watch Antiques Roadshow or something.

Becky's (Lulu Wilson) a troubled teen. Her Mam's death has really rattled her and in the years after she's not unsurprisingly become sullen and withdrawn. Her father (Joel McHale) keeps trying to reconnect and she's having none of it. His announcement that he's getting remarried and that she'll have a new step brother really knocks her for six. But that's a mere ripple compared to what happens when a gang of escaped cons led by the neo nazi Dominick (Kevin James) invades their lives.

This is a B-movie and it makes no bones about it. It's a film made to excite and disgust you. A film designed to both instill and sate your bloodlust. There's the bones of a story here but it doesn't matter. The bad guys are after something but we never find out what. It's, in Hitchcockian terms, a macguffin, a plot device designed to move things forward and it does it's job nicely.  Directing duo Jonathan Milott & Cary Murnion (Bushwick, a technically excellent action flick from 2017 that everyone ignored) know how to make a crowd pleaser that moves along nicely. Becky is a lean & economic 100 minutes long and doesn't waste a single one of them. The only characters that matter are Becky and Dominick. Both are sketched out just enough for us to want to see one live and one die. Everyone else is meat for the pot.

Meat. Oh there's plenty of meat on display here. It keeps it's violence implied for the first half of the film and once you've let your guard down it lets fly. Things happen to eyeballs here that would have gotten this film banned in the 90's. A watery death brings to mind similar in the infamous video nasty I Spit On Your Grave. Dominick goes through an ordeal that makes Tom & Jerry cartoons pale in comparison. When Steven Spielberg made Raiders Of The Lost Ark he chose nazi's as the bad guys because no one cares when nazi's die horribly. That reasoning applies here too. Seeing nazi's scream and squirm and roar is always a good thing. Especially now.

Lulu Wilson as Becky has a wicked time being put through her paces. A teenage Macgyver with a surprising propensity for carnage. She's dealing with her trauma her own way, it mightn't be the healthiest outlet but fuck it, it works for her. And we get a delicious final shot that suggests all manner for questionable decisions in her future. Kevin James as Dominick isn't as successful. He's big and mean and scary but at the back of your mind you'll always be thinking "Ha, the mall cop is on fire now." It's too hard to separate his comic persona from what we see here. Maybe it was just me, but maybe if he taken a role a little less extreme first and gradually worked towards this his turn here would be more believable.

Becky is out now to stream. It's gory exploitation fun with no airs and graces and a lead turn from a young actress who's worth keeping an eye on.