Welcome back Becky fans. As promised I came back for round two tonight and I have to say I’m not disappointed at all. There may have been a moment here or there where I might have started to falter but the film didn’t let me down and by the end credits I was left wanting more once again. I have to say that coming off Cobweb into Becky and now following that up with a sequel has been really nice. That’s three straight nights of genuinely enjoyable films. I know Becky and Wrath of Becky might be stretching the boundaries a little bit but even still, both of these movies still really fit the bill for me. Yeah there’s nothing really supernatural or haunt driven. No ghosts or goblins jumping out at me. You wont find a monster in the basement or a demon in the attic. But the thrills are definitely there. I know some of the movies I’ve got coming up in my last few days of October are going to circle back around to more traditional spooky stories so we’ll still get some of that in before we put up all the pumpkins and black cats until next year. In the meantime, circling back around to Becky once more is nothing but fun.
This movie picks up a couple of years after the events of the first movie. It opens with this sugary sweet scenario where a teenage Becky, clad in conservative clothes and pigtails is adopted by a couple that could induce a diabetic coma with their over the top selves. This is where we introduce a new element that makes this film stand apart from the first one, narrator Becky. That’s right, our final girl is back and she’s breaking that fourth wall and I’m all for it. I almost spelled that “for” as “four” like “I’m all four it” in a really ridiculously cheesy pun. But now I’m breaking my own fourth wall with you. So it’s like a fourth wall break INSIDE a fourth wall break. That’s like 16 walls if my Deadpool math is still accurate. Any way you spin it, narrator Becky is one of my favorite parts of this film. It’s a little goofy but I enjoy it nonetheless as the opener because then we go into this sort of comic book opening montage that spells out what Becky has been up to since we saw her last. After the events of the first film she is clearly an orphan now but we know how tough Becky is because we’ve seen what she can do under duress. She’s capable of taking care of herself quite clearly. But she finds herself under the watchful eye of an elderly black woman named Elena. The two of them have a bond and have cultivated a sort of relationship that works. In the artistic opening sequences we can see that Elena picked up Becky while hitchhiking. Becky lives with Elena and works at a diner in town. This set up seems to be enough for now which means we can only expect that this balance will soon be upset by something or otherwise this would be a pretty boring movie.
In addition to hearing Becky’s thoughts out loud now, we also get her back story of what she’s been up to. She’s more prepared now because she’s been training. This life on the move means she’s mostly reliant on herself so she wants to be as capable in her ability to defend herself as she can be. We see more montages of her jogging, planting traps and digging holes as well as getting mighty handy with a knife. She also continues to train with Diego, he massive dog that solely listens to her. The two make a pretty intimidating duo at this point. Elena really rounds off the hard edges of Becky in some positive ways which is unfortunate because it doesn’t take long to realize that’s most likely where the balance will be upset. In Becky’s waking hours, she spends most of her non-training time at her job at the diner. She has taken to fantasizing about her demonstratively violent ways while dealing with difficult customers. It appears to be a mostly effective means of subduing her proclivities towards stabbing people. Unfortunately the Proud Boy ripoffs in this film the “Noble Men” play a part in blurring that line between fantasy and reality.
One of the hard parts about finding reliable villains is that you try to find people everyone can rally behind hating. And while I’m no fan of the “Proud Boys” myself, I was a little less than enthused that they went with such a notable facsimile of a political organization. In the first installment of Becky, it was easy to rally against Neo-Nazis. The Noble Men in this film are by no means any kind of sympathetic, it’s just the fact that they are meant to represent a political affiliation that is cartoonishly inflated in this movie. My only objection is that I just don’t like the political garbage in my movies. It wasn’t a huge detractor. The characters themselves were still very much despicable. They had extremist ideology and plans to do bad things. They were not good people and it was easy to root against them. It’s that not-so-subtle jab that irks me, simply because there are no shortage of groups of people equally despised among all as well as the notion that you needn’t bring in politics at all to their background. They could just be a group of genuine assholes that deserve everything they’ve got coming to them. All that aside. three of these soon to be organ donors show up in Becky’s diner causing all sorts of trouble. And she doesn’t hesitate to retaliate by “accidentally” spilling hot coffee in the crotch of their leader. This doesn’t set well with him so when Becky departs at the end of her shift, the three ne’er-do-wells follow her home only to cause more trouble for her later. They show up at Elena’s house to give Becky a good scare at first but things devolve quickly as her dog gets beaten with a bat and in an effort to rescue Becky and rid her property of these hooligans, Elena pulls a rifle on the boys and ends up getting shot in the head. Becky gets angry.
This is really the ignition for the rest of the film. Where Kevin James stepped in last time, Seann William Scott plays a similar kind of role as the head of the Noble Men and organizer of some impending local violence. To retrieve her dog and avenge yet another fallen friend, Becky makes her way out to the location of the Noble Men meet up to address the injustices that have been perpetrated against her and her fallen compadre. Once again this is where I’ll cut off my specific analysis of the film as this movie is still somewhat newer and I don’t want to necessarily spoil it. Though even in my review from yesterday I don’t feel like I really spoiled the movie. I still highly recommend watching both movies and enjoying the heck out of them. They go together so well and are incredibly entertaining from beginning to end. There’s hardly a moment here or there when I find myself doubting either of these films. This one is fun because Becky has more room to move. She’s been training so she’s definitely more capable which makes her an even stronger protagonist. With that addition of her narration of the film at times and the relationship she builds with the audience by breaking that fourth wall strategically at times, it really endears her to the viewer in a whole new way.
I will say that one thing I didn’t love about this movie was that while the adults should all have been able to easily deal with a rogue 13 year old in the last movie, it was the surprise of her fighting back that gave her any kind of advantage. She did plan some of her attacks and have some ability to really do some harm just by catching her assailants off guard. This time around she’s more prepared, yes, but Seann William Scott plays a former Army Ranger. I could have seen making him some kind of military. That’s fine. But to have been an Army Ranger would have meant that he received significant training across a number of very serious combat disciplines and even the best trained 16 year old girl with a really wicked mean streak in her from some past trauma is not much of a match for an army ranger. So that part did bug me just a little bit. But the fact that she was able to deal with so many other adults this time around was a testament to her training. Again, the gruesome fashion by which she did rid herself of some of the Noble Men was quite impressive and entertaining. That part will not disappoint, I can promise that much. She’s quite a capable murderer and has only gotten better over time.
In the end, I like that there were a couple additional twists and turns in the story that open up a third installment in this adventure for Becky. Again, I won’t ruin a part of the film by giving away the ending but it certainly leaves it open for a 3rd installment and from what I was reading it would seem that the studios are mostly open to that idea so I think we will be getting another chapter in this story. And there’s still story to tell here. That’s the nice part. I think this could segue into a trilogy quite nicely and be quite competent in all three installments. I know when you get to a third there is a temptation to be a bit lazier when it comes to story so I hope for the sake of it all they keep it tight. The cliffhanger provides a fairly open landscape for what is to come and with even more resources at Becky’s hands I think we could really go big in a finale. As for this installment, I feel like it’s on par with the first. There was a more organic nature to the story, even if it was a little far fetched. It still presented as cohesive. Not that this story wasn’t, but I think the catalyst was a little weaker than the first installment. They tried for lightning in a bottle twice and it didn’t totally work out like that but I will say that for a second installment all around, this movie was still all kinds of fun and I highly recommend it. So that being said I’ll back it off a little bit from Becky and give this one a 7.5/10 because it’s still definitely up there for me as far as my overall watches go for this month. Definitely check these films out if you get the chance. So until we get around to that third installment, I guess we’ll call it a day. Until next time, I’ll catch you on the flip side.
