Directed by Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote | Written by Angel, Coote, and Nick Morris | 84 min | ▲▲▲△△
Back in 2020 a low-budget, high-gore thriller called Becky came out. It starred Lulu Wlison as the titular Becky, a 13-year-old girl who gets revenge on the Neo-Nazis (led by Kevin James!) who’ve invaded her family’s cottage. It remains unseen by me but most accounts have it a fun little throwback to bloody thrillers of the past where seeing bad men get dismembered was an end unto itself.
This sequel presents Becky as a 16-year-old in the foster system, now staying with a lady named Elena (Denise Burse) and working as a server at a small-town diner. One evening three members of a white-supremacist-incel group called the Noble Men show up at the diner. She pisses them off and they follow her home. They’re not too bright these guys, which maybe explains why they didn’t also kill Becky. Instead, they take her mastiff, Diego.
It’s also reasonable to conclude that this light retread of the first film — it begins with another case of bad white dudes home invading and getting more than they planned for — is also shoddily plotted, with characters making the kind of decisions, including Becky herself, that feel like they’re right out of the cheap horror-movie playbook.
It turns out these three dudes are meeting up with a couple more of their little group, including an Alpha Asshole named Darryl (cast against type, Sean William Scott) to plan an insurrection at the local town hall. When Becky finds them she puts her plan into motion, which is to steal their weapons, hide an important zip drive, and, uh, dig holes in their property with a front loader. Really? First off, how did she know how to use the machine — there’s no suggestion she even has her licence yet — and why weren’t the antagonists alerted to her pit-digging by the engine noise?
To complain about these, uh, plot holes may be even dumber than this movie. The Wrath Of Becky is just an excuse for a cute teenager to swear and take a machete to a bunch of Nazis, like a little sister to the recent Sisu — that was a grizzled senior and war veteran with a dog killing German Nazi, this is a teenage girl with a dog killing American Nazis — which certainly isn’t the worst thing to come down the pike. It threatens to be a satire of these kinds of movies — more Home Alone than John Wick — but it won’t commit to being actually outrageous.
The final capper is when the CIA gets involved in what would obviously be an FBI issue, and the picture just doubles down on the dumb. But by that point you’re either on board with Becky and her wrath or you aren’t.
