When I looked at Becky in 2020, it made for one of the more pleasant surprises in a year that desperately needed as many as it could muster. However, I can’t say I was expecting much else to come from it. So you can imagine how quickly I prioritised checking out its sequel once I discovered its existence. I mean, sure, it’s written and directed by the same duo behind The Open House, one of the most pointless Netflix originals in the history of the platform, but as I got into in that first review, a teenaged vigilante laying waste to neo-Nazis is a pretty damn difficult idea to fuck up. Even on accident, this should allow for some cathartic joy, and thankfully, it offers just that.
While Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote’s vision for the titular arsekicker isn’t as interested in delving into the pathology of violence as their predecessors', they’re sticking to the same general area with a plot that is basically a reskin of the first John Wick. Becky (Lulu Wilson making a thankful return), still dealing with the trauma of what took place two years prior, is trying to readjust to ordinary life… until a gang of chuckleheads decide that breaking into the home of her carer, killing said carer, and then kidnapping Becky’s dog was going to end well.
Of course, where the writing pulls back on the analysis of violence as a human instinct, it instead leans directly into Becky’s psychological profile. How that first violent encounter awoke something dark and malicious in her, and afterwards, she is only truly herself when she’s indulging in that bloodshed. It doesn’t have the same morbid fascination as before, given the emphasis on comic timing here, but Wilson really digs into that darkness and does justice to how warped her perceptions of the world have become. It even leads to some pretty funny moments, like when she briefly shows what she would have done with a certain neo-Nazi if she could just find the right keys.
Speaking of those losers, we get Seann William Scott as the leader of a group called the Noble Men, a Proud Boys-esque cell that is preparing to both assassinate a senator and stage an insurrection on town hall. Scott’s visage gives a certain Gavin McInnes twerpishness to the role, and he has his moments of genuine menace, but like Kevin James in the first film, that doesn’t necessarily translate into him being as threatening as he should be, given his character profile. However, credit to the script here because not only does the his rhetoric and that of his cronies fit in the terminology, but the inclusion of Sean (played by Matt Angel himself) adds to the realism of it because he serves as the normie of the group. The guy in the process of being radicalised, but not quite fallen over the deep end just yet. It’s a part of the equation that tends to get left out of the general discussion concerning extremist groups like this, and it shows that the filmmakers know what they’re talking about.
But hey, for as much as the writing shows a touch more forethought, since the actual why of the plot’s movement is more concrete than the general MacGuffin of the original, what about the slashy-slashy Nazi fall down? Well, while it still takes a bit to ramp up to the gore (even for a film that, excluding the credits, barely scrapes 80 minutes), it’s certainly worth it when it arrives. The bloodspray is plentiful, the kills are fairly creative, the climactic death in particular is not only genuinely hilarious, but it’s just so emblematic of how wrong-headed the entire mindset behind the villains (and their real-world counterparts) truly is.
When all is said and done, this is just a quick-and-dirty B-movie, but it’s a very well-made quick-and-dirty B-movie. The writing expands thoughtfully on what the original left off with, and likewise sets things up to get very interesting with its own follow-up which is apparently already in the works, the action is still glorious, and Becky herself is becoming even more compelling than she was before, showing that both the filmmakers and Lulu Wilson have a solid handle on who she is and where she can go from here. It’s just really cool to see another worthwhile action franchise in the making, especially as someone who already holds Wilson in pretty high regard as an actor.
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