FrightFest review – The Last Temptation of Becky
At the end of The Wrath of Becky, Lulu Wilson’s teenage killing machine was recruited by Agent Montana (Kate Siegel) to join the CIA … now, she’s a field op who always goes rogue (her catch-phrase is ‘time for Plan C’) and takes the most violent possible approach to any given problem. In the original Becky (2020), Wilson was a tween and the premise was a spin on Home Alone with the resourceful little girl avenging her murdered father and working out her anger issues to killing neo-Nazis. A mcguffin key buried under her house recurs in this installment, which again escalates things …
Becky is eighteen now and the villains have dropped the neo and are just Nazis. Wilson is fun in the role, though the transgressive angle of the first film has faded away as the star has grown up – it might be funny to keep making these films with Wilson’s Becky like Truffaut did with Jean-Pierre Leaud as Antoine, so we get to see her as a killing machine at various stages of her life. Then again, if this were the capper of a trilogy it’d at least be going out before everyone got too tired. It’s written into the script – by Matt Angel, Suzanne Coote and director Jenn Wexler – that Becky’s bosses know she’ll go off book and slaughter everyone but pretend not to in order to give a bit of a slow build to her covert mission to the Wolf’s Lair, a fuhrerbunker in Poland where General Reuss (Neil Patrick Harris) and Dr Metzger (James Urbaniak) are working on mad science Fourth Reich business which needs a lot of fresh blood.
It could almost be an ultra-violent episode of The Girl From UNCLE or The Avengers (there are plot similarities with the pilot for The New Avengers) as we get spy-fi gags, including Becky posing as a bubbly conservative student tourist and another gang of pathetic Americans cosplaying Nazi. Early on, Becky has a spat with an anti-Becky, teenage Nazi Luisa (Aoife Hughes), which is cut short before she gets a proper arch-nemesis … so Harris, riffing on his Starship Troopers turn, and Catherine Walker, as an icy Ilsa type, have to do the honours in villainy. By this stage in the series, it’s becoming hard to accept anyone as a real threat to Becky – so suspense has to involve the collateral damage and conspiracy angle. Credit to Wexler for coming up with a showstopper of a sequence echoing and one-upping Captain America’s first comic book appearance. Made in Northern Ireland, where Nazi extras are cheap. Maybe it’s time for a time travel team-up with the guy from Sisu.
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