When I first saw a trailer for Becky, it looked like "R-rated Home Alone".
Instead, it's more like "Die Hard with a kid". This isn't a movie about "Home Alone" Antics at all. It's not about a kid who rigs up traps to stop robbers/home invaders. It's about a kid who fights them off through guerilla warfare. The element of surprise is her main weapon, as Becky uses whatever improvised weapons and surprises she can think up to catch the men off guard and maim or kill them. Working to her advantage is that she never has to fight all four of them at once, as they don't realize what a threat she is until after she's already killed at least one of them, and the others are busy guarding her family who are kept as hostages.
The premise is naturally implausible. Home Alone got away with having an 8-year-old fight off robbers because it was a comedy aimed at kids. Becky has the added burden of taking itself seriously, and it tries its best to make its absurd premise believable.
Events in the story are rigged to set up the plot. Becky is introduced as a very troubled teen, who is distraught over the recent death of her mother and her father quickly planning to marry his girlfriend, which Becky sees as disrespectful to her mother's memory. We see Becky casually shoplifting from a store. We see that she's full of pent-up anger, which will soon be let out on some very deserving targets.
Through a series of events both believable and not, Becky ends up in a small treehouse-like cabin in the woods near her family's lakefront house, and gets one walkie talkie while some home invaders have the other. They want a key that is somehow important. Becky has that key. The situation would be as simple as "give key to bad guys, they let family go", but her dad tells her to run away, not trusting the home invaders on their word. That, along with her dad's murder, results in the rest of the movie being about both Becky and whichever of the thugs are currently after her at that moment, both trying to hunt each other down.
And that hunt is the heart and soul of the movie. The camera angles and music sometimes portray Becky's terror at these grown men hunting her down, but sometimes the cinematography utilizes those same techniques to focus on their fear of her.
The killings are gruesome, to the point where I found some of them unintentionally (?) hilarious. I won't spoil any of them, but anger issues aside, some of the ways Becky kills the thugs are just impossible to take seriously, both for being excessively gory and in some cases impossible in real life. And yet, the movie is played totally straight. There's not a hint of (obviously intentional) humor anywhere. Instead, this is a very straight-faced movie about a 13-year-old who kills killers with both of them hunting each other. It's tense, it's a little campy, and it's implausible, and I found it very fun.
Film Very entertaining Narm Charm
When I first saw a trailer for Becky, it looked like "R-rated Home Alone".
Instead, it's more like "Die Hard with a kid". This isn't a movie about "Home Alone" Antics at all. It's not about a kid who rigs up traps to stop robbers/home invaders. It's about a kid who fights them off through guerilla warfare. The element of surprise is her main weapon, as Becky uses whatever improvised weapons and surprises she can think up to catch the men off guard and maim or kill them. Working to her advantage is that she never has to fight all four of them at once, as they don't realize what a threat she is until after she's already killed at least one of them, and the others are busy guarding her family who are kept as hostages.
The premise is naturally implausible. Home Alone got away with having an 8-year-old fight off robbers because it was a comedy aimed at kids. Becky has the added burden of taking itself seriously, and it tries its best to make its absurd premise believable.
Events in the story are rigged to set up the plot. Becky is introduced as a very troubled teen, who is distraught over the recent death of her mother and her father quickly planning to marry his girlfriend, which Becky sees as disrespectful to her mother's memory. We see Becky casually shoplifting from a store. We see that she's full of pent-up anger, which will soon be let out on some very deserving targets.
Through a series of events both believable and not, Becky ends up in a small treehouse-like cabin in the woods near her family's lakefront house, and gets one walkie talkie while some home invaders have the other. They want a key that is somehow important. Becky has that key. The situation would be as simple as "give key to bad guys, they let family go", but her dad tells her to run away, not trusting the home invaders on their word. That, along with her dad's murder, results in the rest of the movie being about both Becky and whichever of the thugs are currently after her at that moment, both trying to hunt each other down.
And that hunt is the heart and soul of the movie. The camera angles and music sometimes portray Becky's terror at these grown men hunting her down, but sometimes the cinematography utilizes those same techniques to focus on their fear of her.
The killings are gruesome, to the point where I found some of them unintentionally (?) hilarious. I won't spoil any of them, but anger issues aside, some of the ways Becky kills the thugs are just impossible to take seriously, both for being excessively gory and in some cases impossible in real life. And yet, the movie is played totally straight. There's not a hint of (obviously intentional) humor anywhere. Instead, this is a very straight-faced movie about a 13-year-old who kills killers with both of them hunting each other. It's tense, it's a little campy, and it's implausible, and I found it very fun.