Beckett - Review

Beckett debuts on Netflix on Aug. 13.

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Beckett is a film that lives in the body of a Hollywood action movie, even though its action is intentionally scant, and its production was only Hollywood-adjacent. Its broad strokes resemble the many action thrillers in which American protagonists are swept up in (or insert themselves into) conspiracies in other countries. However, it ends up halfway between a stripped-down satire of these films and a lukewarm attempt to replicate them. It’s certainly watchable, but it’s also incredibly noncommittal despite its occasional flourishes.

Beckett brings to mind the recent Chris Hemsworth film Extraction, in which Hemsworth’s black ops mercenary rescues the kidnapped son of an Indian drug lord in Bangladesh, though the most relevant comparison is probably the 2004 Mexico-set remake of Man on Fire starring Denzel Washington. Not only does Beckett feature a similar saga of corrupt cops and politically driven kidnapping, it also features Denzel’s son, Tenet star John David Washington, in the leading role. However, unlike his father’s former CIA agent, the younger Washington doesn’t play a man equipped for the job, but rather, a simple tourist in the wrong place — the Greek countryside — at the wrong time — during the European debt crisis in the early 2010s.

Italian writer-director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino takes a measured approach to this real-world political backdrop, though his critique of America’s place in it is far more intellectually stimulating than it is emotionally engaging. For a story based entirely around the journey of one man, that’s a bit of a problem, whether or not that man is an outsider, and whether or not the film is self-aware of its genre deconstruction.

The film opens on Beckett’s countryside getaway with his girlfriend April (Alicia Vikander), a last-minute change from their original itinerary, since they found the protests and rallies near their Athens hotel to be a little too noisy. To the young American couple, these demonstrations are but a background hum on television as they dine on local cuisine; it’s Mediterranean bliss. However, as Beckett drives them to their next destination, a devastating car accident sends them tumbling off the road, and he catches a glimpse of something he shouldn’t have seen. Before long, he ends up alone and on the run, with people shooting at him for reasons he can’t even begin to comprehend.

Armed with nothing but his American passport, Beckett begins a tumultuous journey back to the U.S. embassy in Athens — his diplomatic salvation, and an institution he believes will protect him no matter what he does to get there. Although, the further he travels and the more people he asks for help, the more the conspiracy around him seems to grow. There are guns, knives and fistfights scattered along the way, but none of them feature the hard-hitting impact that audiences have come to expect from action cinema. The choreography is rightfully sloppy, and the sound design during each fight is filled with palpable silences, since no one involved is a trained fighter. In the process, the danger Beckett faces feels increasingly real — he spends a significant chunk of the runtime bruised and bloody  — and the fact that he gets easily winded during the intentionally languid chase scenes only allows the villains to catch up to him. Before long, the silences begin to feel sinister.

Washington brings remarkable physicality to the role, especially in Beckett’s most desperate moments. However, the biggest issue with his performance is one that plagues the rest of the story: Beckett only seems to exist in the moment, and he only seems cognizant of the immediate danger right in front of him. When Washington speaks, he rarely taps into any kind of subtext beneath the words. He seldom makes Beckett feel like someone weighed down by events from days or even hours earlier, despite the film firmly establishing his tremendous guilt over the accident and its fallout. This guilt quickly fades and rarely resurfaces. Beckett’s emotional journey feels entirely separate from his physical one — which is to say, his emotions are something the film often forgets about, even though it has numerous opportunities to draw thematic connection between the attempts on his life and the few moments where he questions if he deserves to live at all.

Washington brings remarkable physicality to the role.

Oddly enough, Vikander’s April is a much more interesting character, even though her role is rather small. Whether by accident or intent, Swedish actress Vikander has an American accent that feels ever-so-slightly off, and she occasionally uses phrases that don’t sound like they belong to American English. The question of where April and her family are originally from doesn’t come up, but she understands enough Greek to get by, and she has a much better handle on Greek food and culture than Beckett does. She seems to have her foot in two worlds, and if nothing else, she serves to further highlight just how much of an outsider Beckett is (he’s also the only Black character in the film, though this doesn’t seem to have been a major factor in the writing).

Outsidership to Greek culture and politics is a key part of the film’s story. At one point, Beckett seeks the help of a German activist, Lena (Vicky Krieps), who’s not only part of the Athens protests against Greece’s austerity measures, but is fully aware of her country's involvement in the debt crisis, unlike Beckett. While the movie’s immediate setting is a fictional conspiracy, it evokes the real political frustrations of the time, and Beckett’s total ignorance of the country he’s visiting often ends up his biggest hurdle. Whatever new and shocking information is revealed to him is often something of which other characters are already aware, so his position as this story’s action hero is firmly tongue-in-cheek.

However, as self-aware as the film may be, it rarely knows what to do with Beckett’s increasing paranoia as an American navigating a foreign country. Moments where the movie embodies his perspective in order to make the situation feel dangerous are few and far between, but moments where it steps back far enough to capture his place in the bigger picture and the inherent absurdity of the premise are just as infrequent. The result is a second half that plays out on emotional autopilot, despite inserting Beckett into larger, more propulsive events (which are, to its credit, captured with an effective eye for scale and human toll).

Most unfortunate of all is that certain moments reveal Filomarino to be a deft visual storyteller, but these moments are scattered far and wide across Beckett’s 109-minute runtime. The director, who headed the second unit on several Luca Guadagnino films, knows just what to do when his story leans unironically toward emotion. There are certain isolated shots, when the camera pushes in toward objects or characters, that feel perfectly timed and stunningly precise in what feelings they evoke. However, most of Filomarino’s aesthetic approach involves holding back. While this works for initial scenes, in which we’re given a lay of the land, it wears thin by the time the story demands greater emotional involvement. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score does a tremendous amount of heavy lifting; it’s creepy and operatic before Beckett has a handle on events, and suitably whimsical once he does. Sakamoto, it turns out, has a much better idea of how to navigate the clashing satire and sincerity — but he can only do so much to elevate the material.

The film, while rarely boring, ultimately has little to say about its lead character or the world he inhabits.