THE LAST TEMPTATION OF BECKY movie poster |
Rating:Not Rated
Stars:Lulu Wilson, Neil Patrick Harris, Kate Siegel, Brandon Flynn, Catherine Walker, James Urbaniak, Aoife Hughes, Noah Leggott, Fiona Marr
Writer:Matt Angel, story by Matt Angel & Suzanne Coote, based on characters created by Nick Morris, Ruckus Skye, Lane Skye
Director:Jenn Wexler
Distributor:Quiver Distribution
Release Date: November 4, 2026
For those who enjoy the notion of punching Nazis, the BECKY trilogy – 2020’s BECKY, 2023’s THE WRATH OF BECKY, and now THE LAST TEMPTATION OF BECKY – has a lot of that. Also shooting, stabbing, blowing up and otherwise more permanently damaging Nazis.
To be clear, in the BECKY films, the Nazis are actual master race-worshipping, assassinating-anyone-who-gets-in-their-way, swastika-wearing Nazis, not “Nazis” in simply the pejorative sense of individuals with questionable politics.
In BECKY, our then-13-year-old title character Becky Hooper (Lulu Wilson) finds she has a violent side when a neo-Nazi group kills her father, seeking a key. Becky gets bloody vengeance on all the home invaders.
In THE WRATH OF BECKY, Becky is sixteen and tracks down and kills another extremist group after they kill her foster mother and kidnap her dog (don’t worry, the dog is fine). Near the film’s end, Becky is recruited into the CIA by agent Kate Montana (Kate Siegel).
In THE LAST TEMPTATION OF BECKY, Becky (still played by Wilson) is now in ensconced in New York. To keep him safe from the carnage that follows her everywhere, she has placed her beloved dog in a new home. This may be just as well, since the proverbial doghouse is where Becky is staying after her latest failure to obey CIA orders. It seems when Becky is sent on operations that are meant to be information retrieval, she has a habit of killing the bad guys and often destroying the intel along the way.
Even so, Becky is sent to Poland, posing as a traveling college student, to find out what exactly is going on there. Her handlers (including Siegel back as Kate) know that Wilhelm Reuss (Neil Patrick Harris), grandson of an original Nazi chemical manufacturer, is trying to launch the Fourth Reich.
Maybe the “last temptation” of the title is Becky’s choice between her orders (“this is your last chance”) and her desire to retaliate against Reuss and his minions. No prizes for guessing what she chooses to do.
With Wilson (an executive producer of the film, as is Harris) still looking very young and playing approximately age eighteen here, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF BECKY plays very much like a YA spy thriller, with super-easy moral distinctions and a noir teen attitude. Only the high violence and splatter levels move this out of the regular YA category.
Director Jenn Wexler and screenwriter Matt Angel, working from a story Angel & Suzanne Coote devised (Angel & Coote co-directed THE WRATH OF BECKY), based on characters created by Nick Morris, Ruckus Skye & Lane Skye, adopt a slightly tongue-in-cheek tone. This keeps everything at a kinetic comic book level and just about allows them to skate on having various characters not open fire when logic dictates they should. (They do lose a point for having Becky utter a homophobic slur, albeit not as bad as the “f****t word.) There are easy recaps of the salient plots from the previous films.
Wilson’s enthusiasm is delightful, and she entirely nails Becky’s sarcastic toughness-masking-anguish persona. Harris leans into Reuss’s profound villainy with soft-spoken relish. Fans of the miniseries THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE may get a kick out of seeing Wilson and Siegel together, as they played the same character at different ages in that project.
THE LAST TEMPTATION OF BECKY isn’t perfect, but it qualifies as lightly absurd gory teen power fun.
