Directors/Story – Matt Angel & Suzanne Coote, Screenplay – Matt Angel, Producers – Jordan Beckerman, Chadd Harbold, Jordan Yale Levine, J.D. Lifshitz, Raphael Margules, Russ Posternak & Tracy Rosenbaums, Photography – Julia Swain, Music – Nima Fakhrara, Visual Effects – Pendulum VFX (Supervisor – Ryan Zum Mallen), Production Design – Allie Leone. Production Company – Post Film/Boulderlight Pictures/Media Finance Capital/Yale Productions/SSS Entertainment.
Cast
Lulu Wilson (Becky Hooper), Seann William Scott (Darryl Jr), Denise Burse (Elena), Jill Larson (Darryl Sr), Michael Sirow (Anthony), Aaron Dalla Villa (DJ), Matt Angel (Sean), Courtney Gains (Twig), Alison Cimmet (Alice), Derek Gaines (Ted), Kate Siegel (Agent Montana)
Plot
Becky Hooper is now sixteen. She is placed with foster parents the Gibbs’ but immediately runs away and goes to stay with Elena. She takes a job as a waitress. Three guys from the white supremacist organisation The Noble Men turn up at the diner. Upset by Becky’s attitude, they decide to follow her home where they shoot Elena, knock Becky out and take her dog. They are part of a group who have been assembled by Darryl for the purpose of assassinating a popular senator. Becky follows them to Darryl’s house and, after overhearing their plans, steals a key thumb drive with information about members of the organisation on it. She then proceeds to take revenge on the group for their murder of Elena.
I quite liked Becky (2020) when it came out. It was a modest home invasion thriller with fourteen year-old Lulu Wilson giving a fierce performance as a teenage girl who employed quite violent means to defend her cabin against escaped criminals. The leader of the group was played by Kevin James in a surprisingly non-comedic turn. The Wrath of Becky is a sequel. Lulu Wilson returns, although original directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion and the first film’s screenwriters have departed but are present as Executive Producers.
With The Wrath of Becky, we have a different directorial team, Suzanne Coote and former actor Matt Angel who had previously made The Open House (2018), which currently sits on the IIMBD’s Bottom 100 list, and Hypnotic (2021), not to be confused with the Robert Rodriguez film. While Becky was realistically grounded and often ultra-violent, the sequel opts for a more cartoonish and unserious tone, particularly when it comes to Lulu Wilson’s sarcastic voiceovers. More crucially, the character of Becky has undergone a substantial change from someone defending her home to a woman avenger eliminating men who are scumbags. In following with the original, the leader of the group is played by an actor better known for comedy roles – in this case Sean William Scott, who displays a fairly bad-ass presence in a villainous role.
The film is filled with flash fantasies in which Lulu Wilson slashes the throat of an old timer in the cafe where she works using a broken plate for calling her ‘sweetheart’. The customer later complains that he didn’t get his order with butter melted on the toast where she tells him there is butter on the plate and to apply it himself. (In any real world setting, this kind of talking back to a customer over such a trivial issue is one that would likely have a waitress fired in very short course).
Becky (Lulu Wilson) goes hunting for revenge
And then there are the new line-up of thugs who go from being escaped criminals in the first film to white supremacists here. Now the group are made akin to the Proud Boys and are on their way to assassinate a senator (a thinly disguised version of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). When Becky meets them in the cafe, they are as obnoxious as possible, calling Lulu Wilson a ‘stupid bitch’, talking about Becky being a stripper name and wanting to fuck her mother. Elsewhere, they mention being followers of 4Chan and joke about femoids (a combination of feminists and androids, which in a piece of dialogue you struggle to think anybody in the real world would ever utter is explained as being “gynocentric evil lowlife bitches hell-bent on destroying any lesser men that doesn’t fulfil their twisted sexual fantasies or their financial fallacies”).
Once the thugs kill Becky’s adopted mother (Denise Burse) and they abduct her dog, The Wrath of Becky essentially becomes a variant on I Spit on Your Grave (1978) with Becky taking revenge on a group of men. All that is lacking here is that she is enacting her trail of revenge following a sexual assault. The rest of the film is Lulu Wilson despatching the various white supremacists in a series of absurd set-pieces – co-director/writer Matt Angel is left at the door with a grenade in his mouth; Courtney Gains (the now grown-up version of Children of the Corn (1984)’s Malachi) gets a crossbow arrow fired through both cheeks; and Seann William Scott is caught between two bear traps.
One of the most ridiculous parts of this is how Lulu Wilson just happens to find ridiculous amounts of firepower wherever she turns, variously being outfitted with grenades, crossbows, guns and graders to dig traps. What causes the film to finally collapse into absurdity is where sixteen year old Becky meets a CIA agent (played by Kate Siegel) who puts the proposition to her “Are you prepared to be the youngest CIA agent ever?” In the epilogue we see the one surviving white supremacist pulled over by a cop car and an officer get out, which turns out to be Lulu Wilson in uniform, who promptly produces a rocket launcher and blows his car up. The first film existed within the realms of plausibility, The Wrath of Becky does not.
