'Becky' - Movie Review

Becky (Lulu Wilson) is a 13 year old girl who is bullied at school and lost her mother to an unspecified disease about a year ago. Now her father (Joel McHale) has taken her to their lake house that Becky still associates with her mother - and he's brought his girlfriend (Amanda Brugel) and her son. None of which makes Becky any happier. When escaped convict and neo-Nazi Dominick (Kevin James) and his friends take them hostage but fail to catch Becky, she causes them ... difficulties. You know all this if you've seen the trailer, and that "difficulties" is a euphemism.

Apparently many critics are praising Lulu Wilson. I can see why: she would have been 14 during filming and she did a very good job. The critical reactions to Kevin James have been mixed: some people thought he was very scary, as he was supposed to be. But I'm with the people who weren't convinced. Given his words and actions, I suppose I would have been scared had I been in his presence; but watching him on a movie screen, I wasn't entirely buying it. He was convincingly unpleasant - not terrifying. on the other hand, Lulu Wilson was getting on towards scary by the end of the movie ...

The movie has some graphic violence. To its credit, it does go slightly beyond a standard action-revenge movie in attempting to show the damage this kind of thing does to the psyches of all involved (but particularly a 13-year-old). Wilson's performance and the violence are the only things you're going to remember as the story, structure, and dialogue are all formulaic.