Netflix: Review of BECKETT: Traumatized Tourist

August 15, 2021

Beckett (John David Washington) was just a regular American tourist vacationing in Greece with his girlfriend April (Alicia Vikander). One night, his car slid off a remote countryside road and crashed into a house at the bottom of the hill. After Beckett woke up at the hospital, he returned to the site of the accident to contemplate the whole tragic accident. However, he was approached by Greek goons who wanted to shoot him down. Running for his life, Beckett had to find his way back to Athens to reach the safety of the US Embassy.  

Beckett's story had a familiar Hitchcockian vibe of a wrong man being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Every step of the way, the audience was brought into the dangerous predicament in which Beckett was caught in. To make things worse, his physical injuries, the language barrier and his unfamiliarity with public transport made his sticky situation even more difficult. The screenplay by Kevin A. Rice placed Beckett in a series of tough spots on which he had only his wits and stamina to extricate himself from them. 

We do not get too much background as to who Beckett was back in the US, so we do not know what he was capable of doing. The introductory scenes of Beckett and April did not really reveal much about them at all despite taking quite some valuable time at the start. In fact, it turns out that it did not really need to be an Oscar-winner like Alicia Vikander that had to be cast in that ultimately inconsequential role.  The role of April could have been played by any random actress and it would not have mattered. 

John David Washington is a very difficult actor to figure out. He had been in a couple of very big films like "Blackkklansman" and "Tenet," where his rather dry performances as an actor were "saved" by the high concepts of these two acclaimed films. In this lower-brow, less complicated film, Washington was carrying the film squarely on his shoulders, but he did not feel right for the role. From the get go, he did not click with Vikander as a couple. Even when he was on the run for his life, he never projected fear or urgency convincingly.

With all the political intrigue and double-crossing, the story probably sounded exciting on paper. However, Italian director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino could not seem to get the suspense thriller aspect of his film going right. The pace actually lagged several times in Act 2, making the momentum of Beckett's escape back to Athens seem sputtering, instead of gripping. The misbegotten ending sequence in the parking building that had Beckett making an incredible death-defying stunt did not help because it was too unbelievable. 5/10.