Sweet Girl Review: Jason Momoa Netflix Thriller Sours Quickly - Den of Geek

Six months after her death, a still furious, grief-stricken Ray and his daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced from Dora and the Lost City of Gold) are tipped off by a reporter that the pharmaceutical firm’s machinations may be just the tip of a far larger conspiracy. Their pursuit of the truth puts father and daughter directly in harm’s way, escalating the family’s quest for justice into a mission of vengeance.

Sweet Girl is one of those movies where the protagonist is supposed to be a working class, unassuming kind of individual who somehow turns into a one-person army and acquires the skills to take on hired killers, corporate security goons, and wealthy, resource-rich tycoons. But we have no idea how this happens: in fact, aside from a few scenes establishing that they both like to fight at a local gym (aha!), Ray and Rachel are completely defined by the loss of Amanda and the path it sets them on.

What makes this even worse is that the script essentially makes Ray into a vigilante and then a murderer. There are films, like the 2002 Denzel Washington vehicle John Q., where an average citizen is pushed beyond the limits of his endurance and patience by a maddening bureaucracy (also health care, in that case). But Sweet Girl doesn’t bother with even attempting the complexity that the Washington film strove (unsuccessfully as well) to attain. The Cooper family’s motivations are never held up for examination, and while we all know for sure how evil and greedy Big Pharma can be, Sweet Girl offers not a shred of nuance or shading.

That turns the film into just a string of violent confrontations as Ray and Rachel go on the run, with both the pharma goons and the FBI in pursuit. We’ve seen the adult-and-kid-on-the-lam scenario so many times before, and there’s even the obligatory calm-before-the-storm sitdown with the main baddie sent to kill them (this one’s in an empty diner, which makes us wonder why the villain doesn’t just do the job there and then — although that’s perhaps the least of the problems with the scene).

But hold on: there is then a massive twist — because of course there has to be one — that not only gets telegraphed pretty early on (most of you will see it coming for miles) but makes all the events leading up to its revelation even more ludicrous in retrospect.



We won’t share that reveal here, but suffice to say that Sweet Girl, with its one-dimensional characters, bland wintry settings, and been-there-done-that action sequences, lost us a long time before the non-surprising twist sealed the deal. The cast, like the movie, is largely forgettable, and while Momoa can coast on his considerable physical presence and natural charisma, those attributes are much better suited to his cheerful bro-dude interpretation of Aquaman than that of a grieving, angry victim of our horrifying, avaricious health care industry.