Imagine a bloodier, more boring Home Alone

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This article was published 04/06/2020 (2309 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A movie cannot survive on premise alone. And yet the efficient, taboo-flirting genre exercise Becky doesn’t have much going for it beyond its elevator pitch, which is: Goofy sitcom dude Kevin James goes dark as a sadistic neo-Nazi escaped convict facing off with a feisty young girl during a brutal home invasion.

Sounds intriguing, right? Well that’s about all there is to it, and even the suspense falls flat.

Our heroine, Becky, is played by the formidable Lulu Wilson, who has brought her creepy kid talents to Ouija: The Origin of Evil, Annabelle: Creation and The Haunting of Hill House, establishing herself as a mini scream queen by the age of 15.

But the Becky script doesn’t stand up to her talents. Written by Nick Moore, Ruckus Skye and Lane Skye, the script just doesn’t give us enough material to care about the story, which is devoid of subtext and keeps everything on the surface.

The writers use a standard home-invasion formula, injected with another standard formula of teen angst: girl loses mother, girl refuses to accept the new bride, Kayla (Amanda Brugel), of her simpering father, Jeff (Joel McHale).

That should serve as a layer of psychological motivation for Becky. But functionally, it’s just a way to get her out of the house when Dominick (James), whose personality is “lots of swastika tattoos,” and his crew of large, nasty buddies escape the prison bus and end up at Becky’s family lake house.

Dom is in search of something hidden in the house, which is, of course, a MacGuffin, again, a plot device that seems to function not as a way to further understand the character or story, but to keep him at the house, torturing the family while spouting vague “purebred” rhetoric and threatening Becky over a toy walkie-talkie.

Meanwhile, Becky is making like Rambo in the woods, rigging various ad-hoc weapons to take out Dominick’s posse in increasingly bloody fashion.

Directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion build a few interesting sequences that visually illustrate the face-off between Becky and Dominick, cheating their profiles together across space as if they’re eye to eye. Otherwise it’s swift and gory horror-flick stuff, aside from a few lyrical sequences of Becky in the woods, her sanctuary and safety.

The problem with Becky is there’s both too much information to sustain any tension, and not enough to sustain interest. We watch as Becky picks off the thugs, and as Kayla intellectually bodies Dom’s boneheaded arguments, but there’s never any mystery or sense that Becky is in danger, owing to her own ferocity and wits.

It proceeds as you might expect it, but the script never gives away any of the “why” of it all, so you just start to stop caring about why anyone is doing what they’re doing and even why this murderous, gender-flipped Home Alone unfolds the way it does. As Kayla exclaims, “What the f— is the point?!”

Comedian James deserves better for his dark turn against type; this is not his Uncut Gems by a long shot. And Wilson has already proved her ability to tackle dark and scary little girls. Becky offers her more physical action and final girl-style stunts, but the character itself is far less complex than any of her other high-profile roles. This half-baked B-movie does leave you wanting more —much, much more.

— Tribune News Service