Dude, Becky is awesome!
You know, the emoji I probably use the most is the eyeroll emoji. If my troll friend sends me a suspicious link that most certainly links to a picture of a well endowed pornstar? Eyeroll emoji. If my brother-in-law messages me some cracker jack bullshit about 5G cell tower radiation opening of the cellular walls? Eyeroll emoji. If my wife texts me while she’s out and ensures me that she’s not willie nillie spending absurd amounts of money on her trip to the store to buy a gallon of milk has turned into an hour and a half excursion? Eyeroll emoji. And especially if some action movie is trying to convince me that some 100lb Hollywood starlet is beating the hell out of some 200lb assassin then I am smashing more eyeroll emoji than zeroes in Kanye West’s lock screen password.
Trust me when I say that when I heard the premise behind the 2020 movie Becky about a 12 year old girl beating the hell out of prison nazi’s, I had my finger on the emoji trigger but after watching the movie the only emoji I used was the one where the little yellow guy has a nuke exploding over his head.
Most of this nuclear level mind blowing had to do with the exceptional performance from Kevin James. You may know him as the fun loving goofy UPS driver from the TV show King of Queens but in Becky he plays Dominick, a sadistic, maniacal, cult leader, nazi prison gang leader who instructs his “children” to murder a pair of young brothers with their bare hands.
The film opens with an interesting bit of cinematography as we get some great visual storytelling, we go back and forth between learning about Dominick and Becky. Lulu Wilson plays the titular Beck, a 12 year old girl who is dealing with the death of her mother in the worst ways possible. She’s bad in school, she steals candy and she talks back to her handsome father (Joel McHale). Dominick on the other hand is a gigantic heavily bearded, nazi skin head with swastika tattoos all over his head who shanks a man in the prison yard.
He then escapes from a prison transport with a bunch of other giant prison nazis, including one named Apex played by Robert Maillet aka Kurgan the Interrogator from WWE aka the giant monster man from 300. Dominick and his gang murder the prison guards, then a father and his two young sons in a station wagon before they head to Becky’s cabin by the lake looking for a mysterious key hidden there.
Spoiler alert!
It is never explained what the key is for or why Dominick wants it. It’s not like they forget to mention it and it’s some sort of plot hole, Dominick is asked directly and he just says some vague nazi bullshit. I absolutely love when movies do this! It’s like, thank you movie creator for allowing me to use my imagination! They could have easily shown you what was in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, or let us watch the spinning top fall at the end of Inception but instead, the filmmakers said, “You figure it out!” This key could have been anything. Open a treasure to some nazi war gold, a safe full of weapons or even a door to anther dimension where Hitler and the Germans won World War 2. Who knows! We’ll never know! It’s a secret and a mystery and I love it!
Dominic and his nazi homies arrive at the lake house and start saying some racist ass shit to Becky’s father and stepmother before they beat up her father and torture him for information about the key, there’s just one problem. Becky has the key and she’s holed up in a tree fort in the middle of the woods with her two well trained dogs, Dora and Diego. At first, Becky is willing to give up the key, but when Dominick murders her handsome father in front of her she decides to jam the key in his eyeball instead.
This movie is insanely gory. When Dominick gets stabbed in the eye his whole entire eyeball pops out of his head and is dangling, after first failing to cut it off with safety scissors, he chops it with a kitchen knife on a cutting board. Becky stabs the shit out of a nazi with a bunch of colored pencils duct tapped together before stomping a broken ruler through his neck. A fatter nazi gets gutted with a boat motor and the coup de grace is Dominick getting his head mutilated by a riding lawn mower during the climax of the film.
While the gore is typically the selling point on most genre films, this one really excels with the characters and story. The giant monster Apex tries to let Beck and her family free on numerous occasions feeling remorse from killing children. Each time though the maniacal Dominick brings him back into the fold by toying with his emotions, including one scene where he puts a gun in Apex’s hand, puts the barrel to his chest and tells him that if he betrays him he’s breaking his heart. And last but not least, Becky, going from the angry, angsty teen to the...well...even angrier, angstier teen. At one point Apex, caught in his feels, tries to save Becky from Dominick and tries to reason with her about how once she kills there is no turning back, her response is a big fuck you and a bullet in the head.
Becky is fucking amazing! The characters are exceptional and show a lot of heart and growth in such a short period of time. The action sequences with the little girl vs the giant hulking men are believable. At one point I prepared my eyeroll emoji and was ready to turn the film off as 80lb Lulu Wilson was ready to face off one on one with Kurgan the Interrogator, who is 6’11” 350lb, but the movie stayed true to physics as the giant man knocked out her dog with one punch and knocked the wind out of her with one big slap to the chest. Bravo filmmakers, and bravo science. Dark, bloody and even funny at times, Becky is one hell of a wild ride and a film that has quickly become one of my favorites. I’ve even gone so far as to recommend this to just about everyone I know, including my 2 young nephews aged 18 and 16 who, after watching, came up to me wild eyed and could only says “Duuuuude! BECKY!”
5 out of 5 and 10 out of 10. Becky is a must watch!
Trigger warning: Some dogs get fucked up. Prepare accordingly.
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