Beckett review: Is the manhunt movie worth the watch?

Beckett stars John David Washington as is another movie in the manhunt genre. Is it worth the watch?

I don’t count the manhunt genre among my film favorites, particularly because it can get redundant quickly. Perhaps I don’t mean the tropes of the genre itself (à la you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all); rather, a manhunt movie can easily go down a narrative path full of repeated moments.

After the hunted man figures out that he’s being hunted, he tends to seek out others and desperately convince them of his predicament as best he can until his hunters find out where he is and force him to go on the lam again. Amping up the stakes each time this occurs doesn’t keep the audience from wondering whether the hunted man is more scared of the people chasing him, or the obligation of explaining to everyone else that he’s being chased.

When not shallowly glancing at European politics, anxiety trauma, or even love, the thin, withdrawn chase thriller Beckett (out on Netflix since Friday, Aug. 13) repurposes this narrative beat many times over. It fills the screen constantly, crowding out room for characterization, meaningful dialogue, and real-world application, all of which would provide Beckett with a greater sense of purpose than sliding neatly into John David Washington’s burgeoning IMDb page.

What makes Beckett different from the rest?

Beckett (Washington, a full-fledged action movie star at this point) is a simple American tourist vacationing in rural Greece with his girlfriend April (Alicia Vikander, unfortunately underused). Madly in love and speaking like two hot people about to be beset by tragedy, they come face-to-face with the unthinkable when Beckett falls asleep at the wheel and veers off the road, killing his girlfriend.

But Beckett survives, and when he comes to, he sees something at the crash site he shouldn’t have. It isn’t that long until some crooked cops learn what he knows, and Beckett becomes embroiled in something that sure seems like it was more than he signed up for!

Beckett uses Washington’s grounded “determination face” to gritty effect, allowing him to use a different shade of a similar color he employed in Tenet. Washington is as convincing as the script allows him to be, in playing a man desperate to find someone on his side.

The flaws in the movie

His Beckett seems informed by numerous ’70s paranoid thrillers that came before him, a sounding board mostly for confusedly pursuing his personal goal. He touches on dramatic emotion that, while convincing, feels out of place given that the script doesn’t give the audience much to know about him. Seeing as Beckett clearly sticks out like a sore thumb against his environment (tourist that only speaks English, Black man in mostly-white Greece, bleeding profusely), the film feels primed to examine the character’s distinct otherness but never goes there.

In fact, by the halfway point, Beckett feels like it might go nowhere beyond its plot. With all the supporting performers serving as personifications of various facets of life (Vikander as lover and Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps as revolutionary, for example), and any glimpse at something underneath Beckett’s primary objective given minimal screen time, Beckett almost feels like a video game narrative at times. The closest thing to nuance the film offers is in the form of Boyd Holbrook’s embassy employee, who slyly embodies a surprisingly astute leftist critique of the Obama-era United States Democratic Party.

An ethereal score by the incomparable Ryuichi Sakamoto and a properly tense, trepidatious lens handled by director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom struggle to bring life to a script filled with large swaths of dialogue-sparse interaction and grimy action sequences. Beckett’s all-too-brief observations on political stratification or mental health are rendered frustrating by never really going under the skin. But at least Beckett has plenty going for him on that front.

Beckett is now streaming on Netflix.