A couple of years after the first Becky, our now sixteen years old heroine (again Lulu Wilson) has been passed through various foster homes and is now living on the run. Well, really, working as a teenage small town waitress in some podunk town. Becky has found herself a new mother figure in form of one Elena (Denise Burse).
Because that’s how lazy scripts work – and this one is particularly lazy – three disgruntled costumers deservedly sassed by Becky turn out to be members of a right wing terrorist group, follow Becky home, murder Elena and steal Becky’s dog.
Which turns out to be a fatal mistake for the men as well as the rest of their cell, for Becky isn’t going to let this sort of thing slide and is still rather great at violently killing people.
New directing and writing duo Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote apparently came out of a screening of the first Becky having missed anything that wasn’t a violent cartoon in it, and decided to make their sequel even more cartoonish. So if you expect anything as clever as the first film’s play with horror and thriller tropes, effective suspense, or writing that at least appears to make some effort towards intelligence like I did, you’ll by sorely disappointed.
The first film’s virtues have been replaced with smug self referentiality, lazy character clichés most DTV action movies would be embarrassed by, and violence that is supposed to be cartoonish and over the top but mostly feels bland and uninspired. There’s a flatness and lack of emotion in the script that’s the enemy of all suspense, paired with a lack of imagination. Missing as well is any idea about what made the first Becky movie fun and special.
On a surface level, this is a perfectly watchable movie, but it is the kind of watchability of rote, by-the-numbers filmmaking and a smugness about one’s own cleverness that never appears based on any actual cleverness, most certainly not intelligence.
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