On a vacation through the Greek countryside, the titular Beckett (John David Washington) slides off the road one night, crashing his car into an abandoned farmhouse and killing his girlfriend, April (Alicia Vikander), in the collision.  After a brief recovery in the hospital, and being questioned by the police, Beckett returns to the scene of the accident when a strange woman begins to open fire on him.  On the run and on his own, he begins to rush towards the embassy, but as he gets closer and closer to the city – and his safety – he learns about the terrorist plot which he unwittingly entered that fateful night.    

Beckett is a thriller that draws heavily on the similarly plotted cat and mouse chases from the 1970s.  It has all the trappings that make these adrenaline-fueled paranoia pieces so exciting; a man in a world outside of his own, with no one that he can trust, in the middle of a wide spanning plot that involves prominent and powerful people.  Unfortunately, though, Ferdinando Cito Filomarino’s film sits well in the shadows of the classics which inspired it.     

Washington is a great entry point to the film and is immediately sympathetic, but that quickly wanes as the film goes on.  There is next to no development in his character besides that he had caused the accident which killed his girlfriend, but as they had so little chemistry in the few scenes they shared at the start of the film, it is a too weak of a through line for the character.  There is also no meaningful reference to her after the crash to fill in their history and Kevin Rice’s script does not build Beckett up to be a strong enough character on his own in other ways, either.  Without any form of an emotional connection to him, it makes the lion’s share of the film in which he is running for his life hard to invest in as Beckett is an incredibly bland and uninteresting character who we know absolutely nothing about. 

Despite this, Filomarino does manage some moments of true tension.  Most notably would be how he employs the language barrier between Beckett and the Greek police officers.  We are immediately distrustful towards many of the Greek citizens because the film does not use subtitles for when they are speaking in their native language.  Coupled with the camera placement and framing of shots, we can never be quite sure what is being said and the feeling of dread and helplessness that comes with it. 

The simpler set pieces and sequences are also done quite well.  There is a chase sequence on a train that is very coherently filmed between Beckett and Officer Xenakis (Panos Koronis).  It is in this more intimate arena where Beckett performs at its best. Later in his journey to the embassy, there is a checkpoint on a bridge, and while its resolution leaves much to be desired, the leadup to it had a lot of potential to be a great scene.  The tension created in these moments is a lot more grounded than what comes later, but the tone of the of the film always tries to stay level so the heightened action seems not to fit into the context of the narrative as it evolves. 

The film quickly becomes gratuitous in its torture of Beckett.  For as excessive as the violence gets, Beckett’s pain tolerance grows at an equally exceptional rate.  This can all be written off in the moment, but when the final sequence asks us to suspend our disbelief just a little too much, everything we let slide to get to this point becomes glaring, and the film falls apart at the seams. 

Further, the resolution of the mystery is unfulfilling as there was little weight given to this plot line which is what has guided the film.  Beckett follows in the footsteps of the protagonists that came before him in that he stumbled into this plot, but once involved he does so very little to actually get to the bottom of it that we never get enough as an audience to really care.  The script wants to make this plot feel important, but its focus is entirely on the chase; Beckett never actively discovers any clues, and the mystery never unfolds within the context of Beckett’s escape outside of the initial setup.  The two storylines run parallel to each other and without that meaningful intersection, the ulterior motives of the terrorist organization take the backseat.  The argument can be made that Beckett does not have a need to be particularly invested in the political crimes, and it checks out given his tourist status, but as our entry point into the film, Rice needed to find ways to make Beckett become more involved. 

While Beckett can be a frustrating watch as it steamrolls closer and closer to its 108-minute runtime, the first act does have a lot to be admired.  Rice sets the stage in his script with enough elements that Filomarino capitalizes on to draw us into the story and Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s cinematography captures the lush landscapes to show off the beauty of the Greek countryside.  If this level of close precision were to be maintained, Beckett could be an extraordinarily strong entry on the resumes of all involved.  Bigger is not always better, and in this case, the film grasps at these flashier set pieces, unfortunately, to its own detriment.