There are certain career paths a fictional teenager is expected to take. A paper round. A Saturday job stacking shelves. Possibly a regrettable spell on the bass guitar. Lulu Wilson’s Becky has instead gone from dismantling a gang of escaped neo-Nazis at a lake house, to settling the hash of a militia calling itself the Noble Men, to – as the trailer for The Last Temptation of Becky confirms – being formally employed by the CIA to do roughly the same thing, only abroad and with a dental plan.
If the embed above misbehaves, the trailer is also here on YouTube.
The premise is pure 1960s Eurospy with the safety catch off. Becky is sent undercover to Poland to infiltrate a family of innkeepers running a tourist venture at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s old command bunker in the Masurian forest. That is a real place, and a real tourist attraction, which is the sort of detail that makes you check your guidebook twice. The paterfamilias, Wilhelm Reuss, turns out to be plotting the Fourth Reich, as innkeepers in this sort of film invariably are. Basil Fawlty merely asked his guests not to mention the war. Wilhelm is trying to restart it.
Wilhelm is played by Neil Patrick Harris, which will cause a small electrical fault in the brain of anyone who remembers Starship Troopers, where he strode about as Carl Jenkins in a long black leather coat of very particular historical tailoring. Verhoeven was being satirical; nearly three decades on, Harris has skipped the subtext and gone straight to the text. It’s also a neat continuation of the series’ favourite casting trick. The first film handed Kevin James – Paul Blart himself – a swastika tattoo and a murderous streak, and the franchise has been cheerfully recruiting genial sitcom faces as fascists ever since. Doogie Howser, it turns out, has gone private.
Across the trailer and the pair of character teasers that preceded it, the marketing knows exactly what it’s selling. Becky lays out an arsenal with the reverence of Ash Williams tooling up in the shed, then shrugs on a jacket bearing an anti-Nazi slogan whose first word cannot be printed before the watershed. Subtle it isn’t. Nobody queuing for the third Becky film was hoping for subtle.
The spy-fi trappings aren’t just window dressing, either. Festival-goers who caught the film at Fantasia in Montreal in July report a proper Q Branch moment, with Kate Siegel’s Agent Montana walking her pint-sized operative through a tray of gadgets, every one of which is clearly going to end up embedded in a Nazi before the credits. Chekhov’s gun, filed in triplicate at Langley. And the genre has a long and disreputable fondness for Nazis who refuse to stay buried, from The Boys from Brazil to the moon-base lunacy of Iron Sky. Long-memoried readers may recall The Avengers episode “The Eagle’s Nest”, in which Steed and Mrs Peel found Peter Cushing and a monastery full of fascist monks on a Scottish island, keeping a certain moustache on ice. Wilhelm Reuss is merely the latest guest at a very old hotel.
Behind the camera, this is the first Becky film with a single director after two double acts, and the first directed by a woman. Jenn Wexler, who made the punk-in-the-woods slasher The Ranger and the satanic Christmas romp The Sacrifice Game, takes the reins from a story by Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote. James Urbaniak – Dr Venture’s voice for those of us who stayed up late with Adult Swim – plays the sinister Dr Metzger, and Brandon Flynn rounds out the ensemble. Production took place in Northern Ireland, which has stood in for Westeros, so a Polish forest was presumably a quiet afternoon’s work. The title, of course, tips its hat to Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, though the only temptation Becky has ever shown any weakness for is excessive force.
Early notices from Fantasia and from FrightFest, where it had its UK premiere in August, have been warm, praising the gore and Wilson’s cheerfully feral energy. The honest caveat, raised even by fans, is that three films in, nobody really believes Becky is in danger; the suspense of the first film has curdled into something closer to watching a terrier let loose in a room full of rats. Entertaining, certainly. Nail-biting, less so.
The Last Temptation of Becky opens in selected US cinemas on 4 November via Quiver Distribution, with Signature lined up to release it in the UK in early 2027. The original was pitched as an ultra-violent Home Alone. Seven years later, it has become a Bond film in which the villain’s fatal mistake was accepting the booking.
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