Posts Tagged ‘Jonathan Milott’

BECKY: 2 ½ STARS. “shocking to see the “King of Queens” without Adam Sandler.”

“Becky,” a new thriller featuring former sitcom star Kevin James as the King of Criminals, and now on VOD, is a mix of home invasion movies like “The Strangers” and plucky-kid-fights-back flicks like “Home Alone.”

Lulu Wilson is the title character, a fourteen-year-old who never got over the death of her mother. When her father Jeff (Joel McHale) announces his engagement to girlfriend Kayla (Amanda Brugel), Becky goes ballistic and takes off into the woods behind their weekend cottage, hiding out in a treehouse fort. She narrowly misses the arrival of Dominick (James), a neo-Nazi with a swastika tattooed on the back of his bald head, and his goons. They’re there looking for a key that was supposed to be in a container in the basement.

Trouble is, it isn’t there.

Thinking Jeff knows where it is Dominick resorts to the usual home invasion techniques of information gathering—intimidation, snarly rhetoric and when all else fails, torture—not realizing that Becky is lurking in the woods. When he discovers where she is, and that she has the key, he sends the goons to get her. What he doesn’t realize is that the tween is, “as strong willed and vindictive as they come.”

Cue the homemade deathtraps and bloodshed. “There once was a little girl who had a little curl in the middle of her forehead,” she taunts Dom. “When she was good she was very, very good but when she was bad she was horrid.”

“Becky,” I suppose, was to be to Kevin James what “Foxcatcher” was to Steve Carell, or Mo’Nique in “Precious,” a way to break out of comedy and into drama. While it is shocking to see the “King of Queens” without a quip on his lips or Adam Sandler at his side, that’s the only shocking part of this performance. Perhaps it’s his hilariously stilted dialogue or maybe it’s just hard to take a guy who made a career playing a heroic mall cop seriously.

Either way, he’s supposed to be a bad, bad man but compared to Becky he’s a peacenik. Set loose in the woods, the teenager calls on every ounce of her bottled-up rage to unleash holy, bloody hell on the men who did her family wrong. She lets her freak flag fly in ways that would make Anton Chigurh look positively tame by comparison.

“Becky” doesn’t have a whole lot of surprises. Instead it relies on bloody situations to drive the horror of its message home.

BUSHWICK: 2 ½ STARS. “a down ‘n’ dirty Dave Bautista b-movie.”

“Bushwick” is a down ‘n’ dirty Dave Bautista b-movie that may feel ripped from the headlines given the news from Charlotte et al.

Apparently inspired by reports of former Texas Governor Rick Perry’s much hyped (but factually incorrect) musings on his state’s secession following the lection of President Obama, the film sees groups of red state paramilitary groups invade Brooklyn, New York in hopes of stirring up a civil war. “We are a united force with the goal of establishing an independent nation,” says one guerrilla soldier, “free from government tyranny and the right to live our lives the true American way.”

The story follows two sturdy survivalists, Stupe (Bautista), a janitor with a special set of skills and college student Lucy (Brittany Snow). Together they navigate through empty streets, dodging bullets from mercenaries with orders to shoot to kill. Sustaining injuries and making deals to stay alive, they try and piece together how civil war can break out in their neighbourhood.

The synopsis of “Bushwick” sounds more political than it actually is. This isn’t a cautionary tale or a social comment on the topsy-turvy state of modern partisan discourse. It dangles its toe in such matters—and others, including race relations in the Brooklyn neighbourhood—but it is, first and foremost, a shoot ‘em up videogame come to life on the big screen. Sure there are some clunky dialogue scenes and a sense that in the scheme of things all the bullets and bloodshed are for nothing but the film’s antiwar sentiment is a hollow platitude given the amount of ammunition used to tell the story.