Sweet Girl is now on Netflix.
Sweet Girl, an action thriller with a relevant political bent, starts out great before plateauing for a while, until eventually, it tumbles downhill. It begins as a straightforward tale of a man seeking revenge against a pharmaceutical CEO, but it eventually throws too many ideas at the wall, few of which stick and almost none of which follow through on what the film is supposedly about. It’s a shame, too, since everyone involved is working at their optimum in one scene or another.
The central revenge story doesn’t get going until the film has dispensed with four different prologues, which vary from a poorly composited foot chase in medias res, to a series of impressionistic flashbacks in which Ray Cooper (Jason Momoa), his wife Amanda (Adria Arjona) and their teenage daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced) hike through the woods. The disconnect doesn’t matter too much, since the film is still laying its groundwork. However, Momoa is clearly more suited to the action and naturalistic dialogue later on, than the initial Terrence Malick-esque voiceover about time and family during these nature scenes.
The two more important prologues follow Amanda’s illness, and Ray and Rachel coming to terms with her death from cancer, after a potentially life-saving drug is yanked out of reach by dead-eyed, vest-wearing pharma bro Simon Keely (Justin Bartha) despite the efforts of a left-leaning, pro-Universal Healthcare politician, Diana Morgan (Amy Brenneman). Momoa digs deep for this section, as a man torn between white-hot rage and full-bodied anguish — watching him keel over from afar is just as effective as closeups of him suppressing full-throated wails — though the film rarely returns to these emotional highs. Before long, Ray’s revenge mission against Keely, and his Indian billionaire benefactor Vinod Shah (Raza Jaffrey), reveals an even wider conspiracy, which leads to Ray and Rachel having to go on the run from various hitmen and mercenaries.
The father-daughter duo are trained kickboxers, and the film’s fight scenes pack a punch. The camera captures hand-to-hand combat in close proximity, and while it shakes around to capture mood and momentum, it’s never disorienting. The sound design makes each hit feel appropriately painful — Ray and Rachel may know how to fight, but they also bruise and bleed — and while the editing has a zippy quality, it almost never cuts during the moment of contact, the way Hollywood movies often do, so each kick and punch lands with the appropriate impact.
The action feels most fun when Momoa wields a fire extinguisher, and it feels most dangerous when he’s up against final-boss hitman Amos, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. Director Brian Andrew Mendoza and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd capture Amos with an air of mystery, especially during fights. The character’s identity isn’t a secret — if anything, who he is doesn’t really matter — but his face is often obscured by the camera’s movement, even when he’s technically in full view. The result is an obscuring of his intentions, and it makes him feel inhuman and otherworldly.
Steven Price’s music is propulsive too. The score maintains a combination of momentous percussion and heavy, heartfelt strings, simultaneously enhancing the action and the grief that underlies Ray and Rachel’s journey. However, while the fight scenes range from competent to explosive, the story begins to lose momentum after a while. The film is front-loaded with enjoyable moments, but the physical and dramatic beats begin to repeat themselves in the second half, which eventually veers off course.
The story of a family devastated by the American healthcare system remains, but it fades into the background of a different story of a man consumed by revenge and a daughter who tries to pull him back from the brink, which would be far more engaging were it not for a pair of bafflingly handled plot turns. One is thuddingly obvious, and it gives the film’s politics a cynical and simplistic new layer that it clearly didn’t need. Meanwhile, the other arrives so suddenly and unpredictably that it feels like a cheat.
Worse yet, it retroactively re-frames the entire movie, but in a way that makes the presentation of the preceding story far less interesting in retrospect. It becomes immediately clear that the film should have gone down this road in the first place, rather than trying to pull a fast one on its audience; the reveal in question doesn’t impact the characters in the slightest, and it only serves to rob Isabela Merced of a potentially star-making turn. Sweet Girl may very well be the first film to advertise its own superior alternate cut.
