Very Slight Spoilers for Sweet Girl
Sweet Girl attempts to tell a revenge story by pitting a man and his daughter up against a major fictional pharmaceutical company conducting unethical business affairs. This Netflix-produced film tries to grab you with a typical revenge plot against a type of company we all want to see brought down, but instead gives you predictable plot points and a nonsensical twist that makes a majority of the film completely meaningless.
We open with a scene that is clearly from the back half of the movie showing Jason Momoa uttering the most generic line, which makes me groan: “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” This is not a good sign for the writing to come from this movie. Momoa then jumps off the roof of a baseball stadium. We cut to years earlier. No time table, just years. And with this flash forward, I am put in a sour mood. I dislike flash forwards like this. I don’t want to see where the movie is going, it takes away the intrigue and suspense up until that point. It makes me question whether anyone likes this. Does anyone see the end of the movie and say, “I am happy I know where this movie is going to take me”? I can’t imagine this is a storytelling technique that excites anyone.
After our “years earlier” cut, we are now in a time where Momoa is not jumping from baseball stadiums. We meet our hero family, very clearly with their inside jokes and loving idioms, as they are shown being an adventurous trio before the plot can get going. We are treated to a voiceover by Momoa, who delivers his lines in such a monotonous way it would put Grey’s Anatomy to shame. We are quickly montaged into a hospital where we find our main protagonists, Ray Cooper (Momoa) and his daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced) trying to keep the positive vibes with their dying wife and mother, Amanda (Adria Arjona). We are given a rollercoaster of news as we are told the mother will get a generic drug to save her life and then quickly find out Big Pharma paid the drug company to not go to market, effectively killing Amanda. This becomes the catalyst for the rest of the movie.
Momoa tries to play distraught, but instead he comes off as selfish as he leaves his daughter alone to go scream in an empty hallway. There are glimpses of emotion from Momoa as he first shows subtle anger, but when he rages, it feels like you can see the director saying, “Be more angry.” Merced, on the other hand, shows a great range of emotion, even when the script is confusing. However, Momoa and Merced have great chemistry that I fully buy into. It doesn’t save the movie, but it at least makes something about this film noteworthy because there is not much good to gush about.
We then yadda-yadda the heartbreak and jump six months later to show Ray taking out his anger on a punching bag and training Rachel to be a ruthless fighter. We get the usual exposition about how they have no money, eat the same thing everyday, and can never really move on. This is just the beginning of the many recycled beats that we have all seen before. Ray receives information from a reporter that there is proof out there, but the reporter needs Ray’s help. Because this plot needs to move forward fast, the reporter is killed and Ray is stabbed and we again do a time jump, this time two years in the future.
Ray, now hell-bent on killing everyone involved with his attack, has a confrontation with Rachel about what further actions he can take. These types of conversations carry on throughout the movie in agonizing ways. Ray wants to get revenge, but Rachel wants him to stop. After every major action piece, we get this conversation again. Nothing new ever comes of it and this movie insults our intelligence by wasting our time having conversations that will not go anywhere.
Sweet Girl then moves to the real plot of our father/daughter team taking off in this paint-by-numbers trip to track down everyone responsible for Amanda’s death. Predictably, everyone they track down reveals that there is a bigger, badder, more evil, person above them pulling the strings until it gets to the point you predicted in the first 15 minutes.
Along the way, there seems to be a team of mercenaries tracking down the Coopers lead by Amos Santos (Manuel Garcie-Ruffo). Each fight scene could be supercut together and you would have no idea where the fight took place because the action is as bland as this plot. Each fight consists of someone being thrown into a wall, followed by themselves being thrown into a wall. Every fighter in this movie only knows one move, and it is to throw people into walls like they are a Terminator. After the second fight, you become numb to the action and are just quickly hoping something less predictable comes around… and then it does!
Nondescript spoilers below
A third act twist completely changes how this movie should be viewed, taking away everything we thought we knew about the characters in front of us. In a better movie, this is a game-changing twist that would make me want to rewatch this movie to pick up on the little details that I missed the first time. Instead, I was excited to see this movie try something new, but then I began thinking about how this messes with the rest of the story and it takes away from major plot points that now make no sense with this new reveal. There is no attempt to explain why we saw things differently. Before we can even really question what is going on, the movie jumps to the climax, hoping we can ignore that this twist invalidates a large part of the rising action.
Sweet Girl has good talent in front of the camera; Isabela Merced is a star and outshines everyone. But Jason Momoa is here collecting money and not much else. It looks like he was going for range with his performance, but he misses the mark in unbelievable character choices that made me question his character more than applaud him. Everything about this movie misses the mark. The plot is as predictable as an episode of Blue Clues and the third act twist makes the rest of the movie nearly unnecessary. With a couple of story tweaks, this could be a great watch, but for any avid movie goer, this is a must avoid.
Grade: D
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