Mark Reviews Movies: SWEET GIRL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 20, 2021

Is the problem that filmmakers can no longer get away with big twists, because we've seen the significant ones done so many times, or is it simply that the makers of Sweet Girl are incompetent in trying to cover their tracks? The major revelation of Gregg Hurwitz and Philip Eisner's screenplay, obviously, should not and will not be disclosed here, but that's almost irrelevant. The screenwriters and director Brian Andrew Mendoza almost make certain that the major "surprise" of this movie is apparent immediately when it becomes part of the story.

That's not intentional, of course, on the part of the filmmakers, who play a lot of games in the movie's dialogue, staging, and editing to attempt to keep us from knowing what's really happening here. All of those tricks fail, mostly because the transparency of the gamesmanship makes the game itself equally transparent.

None of this should matter, as long as the story above the trickery possesses some degree of interest and some quality that makes it worth engagement. Here, though, the story and, indeed, the characters only seem to exist to support an excuse for the big revelation. If it fails, as the twist does—and on multiple levels—in this case, of what purpose and significance is the story itself?

It begins, at least, with something grounded in emotional and political reality (Well, it does after an unnecessary prologue, which shows us a key event later in the story and begins the movie's cheating right away). Ray Cooper (Jason Momoa) has a happy life and family, with wife Amanda (Adria Arjona) and daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced). All of that threatens to collapse when Amanda's cancer returns.

The couple already has re-mortgaged their home, and even with extra hours, Ray's paycheck isn't going to be able to cover a second round of medical bills and prescription costs. The drug that helped the first time is inordinately costly, but some hope arrives when a competing companion announces the release of a generic version.

Those hopes are dashed when the generic drug is delayed indefinitely. Simon Keeley (Justin Bartha), the CEO of the company that originally developed the drug, has paid off his competition. Ray calls into a TV interview with Simon to threaten to kill the guy if the worst happens. It does.

Months pass. A journalist calls Ray to meet, promising information that could take down Simon the legal way. Rachel follows her father, and after the journalist is murdered in front of both of them, Ray is injured—stabbed and kicked through a window—trying to stop the killer.

A couple years pass from that incident, and Rachel, who has been training to fight, and Ray are determined to uncover all of the corruption and uncover all of its layers. They inevitably become fugitives, when one of Ray's interrogation sessions turns fatal.

The rest of the plot amounts to a lot of chasing, plenty of hiding, and multiple fights, as father and daughter keep finding new layers to the conspiracy that resulted in Amanda not getting the medication that could have helped her. Quickly, all of that emotional grounding disappears, because the story simply becomes about cat-and-mouse games and action sequences. The underlying anger at and cynicism about the current and seemingly endless problems with the health care system in the United States are mostly forgotten, too. The movie is simply too busy—coming up with new obstacles, new foes, and ways to simultaneously hint at and distract us from the actual mystery—to make these characters or this scenario into something based on human emotion or political outrage.

All of this feels like a game on top of another game, as Mendoza keeps trying to evade any sense of character or theme in favor of an onslaught of action, while the screenwriters continue to avoid dealing with the actual ramifications of the relationship between the main characters. Momoa, who shows some genuine pain in the first act of the story (A scene of him stalking the halls of the hospital, looking for a place to be vulnerable, is effective, although unfortunately and farcically staged), is reduced to a generic dispenser of physical punishment. Merced is equally underutilized, cowering in the background, until the third act, when the mess of the twist and all of its ludicrous consequences overwhelm whatever could be of her character and performance.

In the end, the central flaw of Sweet Girl seems to be that the screenwriters built this story around its big secret. When that collapses, everything else follows.

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