Metacritic reviews

It’s thanks to a kind of tug of war between background and foreground that Beckett succeeds as a piece of entertainment.

It’s intriguing to see Filomarino experiment with the formula and exciting to imagine where his career might go from here.

Thin and politically disengaged as this diverting Euro-thriller can be, it never forgets how even the most desperate of people can be left to suffer in plain sight — nothing but figures in a landscape.

Beckett is a solid Netflix effort that offers a throwback to the intense political manhunt thrillers of the 1970s.

The Beckett character is sparsely written, and the sometimes bland performance Washington delivers doesn’t fill in many characterization gaps; it’s a problem that affects the pacing, too.

Beckett, though, has better films in its DNA - it is by no means original. What it mostly serves as is a reminder of what is missing from independent cinema - and may well be gone for good.

If you’re going to keep your audience guessing, you need to provide them with answers they care about. Beckett doesn’t.

This is every bit the international thriller, from the exotic locations to the global political elements to the cast. If only we could get involved in Beckett’s story and truly care about his fate.

For a film in which John David Washington lurches, staggers, stumbles, shambles, flounders, falters, wobbles, scrabbles and totters across an entire Greek province . . . Beckett sure is dull.

Directed with a workmanlike lack of style by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino and written by Kevin A. Rice without the required ambiguities to feed the protagonist’s paranoia, this pedestrian wrong-place-wrong-time manhunt through Greece never really sparks. And the jury that’s still out over whether John David Washington is movie-star material gets shaky evidence to support that case.