Sweet Girl (2021) Review

“Sweet Girl” Netflix Poster

Director: Brian Andrew Mendoza
Cast: Jason Momoa, Isabela Merced, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Raza Jaffrey, Justin Bartha, Lex Scott Davis, Michael Raymond-James, Amy Brenneman, Reggie Lee
Running Time: 110 min.

By Paul Bramhall

For a long time it seemed like the musclebound hero was a thing of the past in Hollywood action cinema. The bombastic action movies that dominated the 1980’s filled with ripped six-packs and bulging biceps had long fallen out of favour, and to this day there’s only really 2 options – either 1. You’re Vin Diesel so your “family” has your back, or 2. you get cast as one of the more ripped superheroes in the MCU or DCU. It was option 2 that happened for Chris Hemsworth, who’s biggest claim to fame was playing Patrick Swayze’s role in a disastrous remake of Red Dawn, when he took on the role of Thor and nailed it. It’s a similar story for Jason Momoa, who took the ill-advised decision to step into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s shoes for a critically mauled reboot of Conan the Barbarian, until he found his groove as the nautically inclined Aquaman. Life was good, but what do you do in-between these super-heroic cinematic outings!?

One answer to the question comes in the form of Netflix. With the likes of Cannon Films and PM Entertainment long gone, the streaming service has taken it upon itself to provide a platform (and the funds) for the kind of straight up macho action flicks that the likes of Hemsworth and Momoa would be headlining if we were still in the 80’s. In 2020 we got the Chris Hemsworth vehicle Extraction, a movie that puts him front and centre as an archetypal grizzled action hero more than any other title in his filmography, and in 2021 Momoa got his time to shine with Sweet Girl. Outside of his trident brandishing adventures Momoa has frequently taken on roles which cast him as a kind of spiritual Bear Grylls man-of-the-earth kind of guy – see Road to Paloma, Sugar Mountain, Braven, and his role in the TV series Frontier. More often than not, you know what kind of character he’s going to be playing.

Sweet Girl does nothing to change that perception, and marks the directorial debut of Brian Mendoza (who served as producer of Momoa’s Road to Paloma and Braven). Opening with a voiceover from Momoa offering up generic musings on the meaning of memory and identity, we learn that his wife has cancer and doesn’t hold much hope. Thankfully there’s a new affordable drug just about to come on the market which his wife is eligible for, offering a ray of light for the family. Unfortunately the drug never sees the light of day when a big pharmaceutical company called BioPrime pulls it off the market, leaving only unaffordable options on the table. It just so happens that the CEO of the company, played by Justin Bartha (Doug from The Hangover movies), is appearing on a TV news show and taking questions from callers, so Momoa dials in and tells him in no uncertain terms “if my wife dies it’s your death sentence.”

His wife does die, otherwise we wouldn’t have much of a movie. Now a single father to his teenage daughter, played by Isabela Merced (Dora and the Lost City of Gold, Transformers: The Last Knight), Momoa receives a tip-off from a reporter claiming to know secrets about BioPrime that’ll “blow this thing wide open.” They agree to meet on a train, which unbeknownst to Momoa his daughter has also followed him to, however before their conversation can conclude the reporter is stabbed by a hitman. This gives us our first dose of action in Sweet Girl as Momoa (and his obvious stunt double) tussle with the hitman, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (6 Underground, Sicario: Day of the Soldado), which he barely escapes from. With both his and his daughter’s identities revealed, Momoa and Merced make a reluctant Lone Wolf and Cub as they take to the road with the hitman and various other mercenaries never far behind. 

The story of Sweet Girl is pure pulp and subtle as a brick, pitting a salt of the earth blue collar worker against the evils of big pharma. The script, credited to Gregg Hurwitz (the popular Orphan X novels) and Philip Eisner (who penned Event Horizon), suffers from the double whammy of being both remarkably clunky and overly generic. The TV news show that Momoa dials into is a debate between Justin Bartha and Amy Brenneman (88 Minutes, Daylight) playing a congresswoman against big pharma, and includes such heavy handed lines as it’s a “human right to have access to safe affordable medication” and “we’re committed to healing the world.” Bartha’s evil is portrayed through such unimaginative ways as his mixing up of India and Africa when giving a speech at a charity event, and there’s an undeniable laziness that seems to permeate through the overlong 110-minute runtime.

We get a generic scene of Momoa knocking seven bells out of a punching bag. We get another generic scene of the rage filled daughter having a sparring fight in an MMA gym, and failing to release a choke she has on her partner even when he taps out because, well, she’s so full of rage. We get the generic female FBI agent on the father and daughters’ tail who empathises with their situation and wants to help them fix things. It all feels overly familiar, and neither Momoa or Merced are particularly convincing, with Momoa overly playing the whole man of few words angle, and Merced falling into the resentful daughter stereotype who just wants to live a normal life. Of course when it comes to action movies, sometimes even unremarkable storytelling and underdeveloped characters (I’m not sure we ever actually do find out what Momoa’s day job is) can be forgiven if it delivers the action goods.

With fight choreography credited to Jeremy Marinas, a stuntman who contributed to the fight choreography on the likes of D.J. Caruso’s xXx: Return of Xander Cage and Isaac Florentine’s Close Range, there’s unfortunately very little on display here that hasn’t been done before and better. An elevator fight suffers from quick cutting and derivative choreography, and later on a motel ambush by a pair of armed assailants doesn’t fare much better. Considering in the latter Momoa brandishes a fire axe, as a weapon it’s criminally underused in the scene, and any signs of originality or creative flair are sadly missing in action (pun intended).

What most people will talk about when it comes to Sweet Girl though is the twist that takes place 30 mins out from the finish line. It’s almost like director Mendoza knew he had a clunker on his hands, so scrambled to think what could be done to ensure the Netflix algorithms show audiences watched to the end. It’s the kind of twist that’s so preposterously implausible that it makes the reveal in Roy Chow’s 2009 thriller Murderer seems like a homerun. In any case, at least that twist committed to its insanely out there logic however ludicrous it was. The twist here is insulting, as rather than rely on a certain perspective to turn things on their head, it simply means that various prior scenes were lying to the audience in order to blindside us, which is both incredibly lazy and feels like a cheap shot to the time we’ve invested in watching. The fact that the nuts and bolts of it are completely unbelievable is just the icing on the cake.

The laughable reveal makes the final half hour a particularly arduous slog to get through, as with the narrative’s credibility in tatters any kind of investment, no matter how small, has also gone completely out the window. Merced finally gets to take centre stage as the title alludes to, and is left to take on Garcia-Rulfo as the unstoppable hitman (with a penchant for killing used car salesmen) alone. As the closest we get to a finale it’s an unremarkable and over-edited showdown which fails to convince in anyway that Merced could be victorious, although by this point the fact that she is ironically turns out to be one of the lesser suspensions of disbelief that Sweet Girl demands of its audience.

Ultimately Sweet Girl feels like a Hallmark TV movie that’s been attempted to be spiced up with a smattering of action and an overzealous script that was a leftover from April 1^st. In the opening scene we meet Mamoa standing on the edge of a stadium’s rooftop, contemplating jumping into the river far below. As the FBI officer confronts him, he turns to face the camera and says, “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” It’s a shame it was.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 3.5/10