Beckett is very much an action-travel drama but an action-drama especially those set in Hollywood reminds little of the actions in the movie, as the production was quite close to Hollywood though not fully. Its larger horizons can be compared to the numerous action thrillers that involve an American getting (or making himself) embroiled in conspiracy in another country. However, it eventually finds itself half-way between an underhanded parody of these kinds of movies and an insipid useless attempt to make such a picture. It surely is silky smooth and not much engaging ‘thrill seeker’ in spite of few peaks every now and then.
On the other hand, Beckett makes one think of data extraction starring Chris Hemsworth in which a black ops mercenary played by Hemsworth saves a drug lord’s son from a prison in bangladesh, only this is far more probable comparison to the 2004 Mexico city remake of Man on Fire. Apart from more or less the same plot of politically motivated abduction and kidnappz of corrupt cops, Beckett also has John David Washington Denzel’s son playing the lead role. Gayle is too welcome in Fetchnig Denzel Washington who garnered her whoressed all the Shocking Howard Tickets presidentical speaker men instinct got over it. Still, the younger Washington unlike his father’s ex-CIA officer character does not get the opportunity to portray a person in the thick of affairs, and is simply a clueless tourist – a Brit residing in the wrong time – when the European debt crisis struck Greece at the beginning of the 2010s.
Italian writer-director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, while taking a detour in the opposite ideological, yet interesting and good use of international politics has its limits: he makes criticism of America quiet. When its just about one man’s complete journey and that man is the outsider and the film has a self consciousness of that particular genre deconstruction, then its some what a problem.
The film begins with Beckett and his girlfriend, April (Alicia Vikander), at Beckett’s country house, which was not the original plan; they wish they had not gone outside as they did because the protests and rallies in the vicinity of the hotel in Athens were in their view, a tad noisy. To the young American couple, these events are mere background noise on the television anyway while they are stuck in and stuffing themselves with good Mediterranean food. But when Beckett is driving them somewhere else, their next stop is reached too fast in a car crash, and he might have seen something unfortunate. He soon finds himself in an empty house, deserted and hunted down, with bullets flying over his head without him realizing the causes and nevra out of killing people.
With only an American passport in his possession, Beckett embarks on a tempestuous odyssey towards the U.S. embassy in Athens – the only entity he can expect to save him from the mess he is in; or as he envisions, never mind what If he does what it takes to get there. But the farther in such travels he goes and the most help he seeks from the people the more the circle of the conspiracy surrounding him seems to extend. There are elements such as guns, knives and fist fights along the way but nothing that delivers the potent impact that most viewers of these kinds of films are accustomed to. It is casted in an appropriately messy way and almost every action sequence has an apparent void in the sound effects as well, considering that Non of the people fighting are actual fighters. As the story proceeds, the threat posed to Beckett becomes more and more tangible – not only because he has been in the majority of the screen time covered with wounds and bruises but also the fact that he cannot move fast during the scene with slow pacing and there is no need to explain it because the movie is already finished . Soon, the empty spaces begin to be odious.
In the struggle of portraying the part, Washington impressively bears the physicality of the character, especially during the times when Beckett is most desperate. Nevertheless, the major flaw in his depiction is the one that recurs throughout the narrative: Beckett appears to be living for the moment, aware of the imminent threat in front of him but unable to address any other circumstance. When Washington delivers dialogue, he does not try to convey more meaning than the literal words. In other scenes, he hardly ever makes Beckett a character who carries his thoughts and memories of the events that happened about a day or even a few hours ago, everything suggesting that he carries tremendous guilt over the accident and its aftermath. This sense of guilt wears off rather quickly and is seldom revisited. There is a complete disassociation between the emotional growth of Beckett within the narrative and his growth on screen, to put it differently, his emotions seem to be what the film often neglects during the course of the film, even where there are plenty of possibilities to draw links – thematically – between the attempts on Beckett’s life and the several instances when he questions his right to live.
Vikander’s April is an improbable character, rather unthankful by her function, and yet somehow the most appealing to the viewer. It isn’t known if it was deliberate or accidental, but Swedish-American actress Alicia Vikander speaks English with a noticeable but slight outage, and makes American idioms that a lot of American English speakers wouldn’t recognize. There is no question of where April’s family comes from or where she was born, but she speaks enough Greek to make herself understood, and has a greater appreciation of Greek cuisine and culture than Beckett does. It appears she is straddling two cultures, and if at the very least, she helps to illustrate how much of an outsider Beckett is (he happens to be the only Black person in the film as well, although this doesn’t seem to have played much part in the scripting).
Outsidership to Greek culture and politics is a key part of the film’s story. At one point, Beckett turns to a German activist Lena (Vicky Krieps) who is not only actively involved in the protests in Athens against the austerity measures in Greece but also knows that her country is part of this debt problem, which Boskin mutely refuses to accept. While apparently the plot of the film is consistent with a fantasy, there are real issues of that period that those fantasies springing politically. And as Beijing’s report suggests, the most frustrating part for Beckett while traveling to countries is his complete lack of knowledge about the land. Whatever new and shocking information comes on the way of the protagonist, such information is often arousing, but familiar to other characters and putting him in the position of the action hero is rather sodden.
Still, though the movie is self conscious, there are very few instances where it is aware of what to do with Beckett as herg rather paranoid as an American in a foreign land. Such instances where the film takes on his vantage to lend the scene a sense of threat are rare, even more so are moments when it pulls back from there sufficiently to bring some degree of this absurd notion into focus. The effect is therefore, this rather uninteresting emotional ‘route one’ act of the second half of the play, setting, but attempting to breathe some life into Beckett, who finds himself in more interesting events of an epic scale and massively emotional impact.
What saddens the most, however, is that some parts of the film show promise in the filming technique where Filomarino would be able to tell the story in images purely. It is quite an interesting detail that, speaking about the American director, it would be absurd to avoid discussing his concern with the emotions. There are some distinct instances, shots, cuts, or pushes of the camera filmic that are heated, focused, and timed very well to the emotions they provoke on the audience. Here, however, a majority of Filomarino’s aesthetic strategy simply calls for restraint. This is relatively fine in case of the first few sequences where we are shown the ropes, but this grows tedious by the point the plot calls for more emotional investment. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score seems to do an overwhelmingly large share of the labor; it goes into the unsettling and operatic pin before beckett even has a grasp of things, and quite appropriately silly when he does. Sakamoto, as it turns out, knows much more about how to contain the contradictions of the fable’s comic stretching and simple heartfelt tone – but that is about all he is capable of doing with the given material.
Although it is not very boring, the film in the end does not really have anything new to add concerning the main character and the society he dwells in.
The Final Outcome
A holidaying couple becomes a victim of a violent conspiracy and faces the spoils of the conspiracy in the end. Starring John David Washington and Alicia Vikander.
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