directed by Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion
The short description of this film might be Home Alone meets Saw. In other words, if you are at all sensitive to depictions of violence, this is not, repeat NOT the film for you. Got it???
Even if you are inured to gruesome violence, this film goes over the top showing the violence suffered, but mostly committed by its teen anti-heroine. I'm not joking. This film is not comedic except in the most over the top way that might occasionally be experienced by the most jaded horror/thriller viewers. The only deference to viewer sensibilities is that we are spared sexual assault, which given the circumstances of this film, could have been expected.
Since before River Tam and proceeding thru Arya Stark there has been a strain of occasionally tongue in cheek but often serious filmic or novelistic depictions of young, small, teen or preteen girls who are often able to outwit or outfight one or more fully grown male adversaries, or at least hold them at bay until the cavalry arrives, so to speak.
Becky takes that trope, turns it up to 11 and stomps on the distortion pedal. But it also very broadly hints that the ability to commit violence is not something to be admired or sought after. This little girl has some problems.
She acts out at school, refuses to interact with her father Jeff (Joel McHale) with anything remotely involving respect, shoplifts, and like a lot of people with emotional problems wants to make sure that everyone around knows that she's mad.
Very mad. Extremely mad. If I did or said half the things she did when I was her age I would have gotten smacked right in the mouth. Repeatedly. But times have changed haven't they?
Adding to Becky's brooding anger is the fact that her soft willed schmuck of a father has chosen to inform her abruptly that they will not be spending time together alone at their lakefront vacation home as Becky thought. No, instead Jeff has invited his new
Jeff tells Becky that she had better get used to seeing a lot of Kayla and Ty. Jeff and Kayla intend to marry. Becky is outraged. It's apparently not even been much beyond a year, if that, since Becky's mother passed away. Furious by what she sees as an imposition, Becky snarls some rude things and leaves for the woods. Becky's only friends are her Cane Corso dogs.
Dominick is genial, polite and will snuff out a human life with about as much thought as you change your socks.
James' role is not quite as meaty as it could have been but it's definitely far away from the Doug Hefferman/King Of Queens and other mostly harmless decent fat guys that he usually plays. James makes you wonder what other leading man or leading villain roles might have been hiding behind a long career of self-deprecation.
Wilson's Becky transitions from teen petulance to near psychosis almost seamlessly. She doesn't take the violation of her home lightly. What she lacks in size and muscle mass she makes up for in inventiveness and sheer bloody-mindedness. Her not so repressed rage from her mother's death and her father's "betrayal" and a few other events swiftly goes from firecracker to nuclear bomb.
The viewer can decide for himself or herself where the demarcations are among grief, rage, and shock. Wilson demonstrates all of those, sometimes at once. The script wasn't so good; Brugel doesn't get to do much. This is really a cat and mouse game between James and Wilson's characters.
TRAILER
