Netflix's Action Hit 'Sweet Girl' Is a Proudly Ridiculous Jason Momoa Slugfest
Aquaman bodyslams Big Pharma in this wild streaming adventure.
Back in 2018, Jason Momoa starred in a movie called Braven, where he played a brawny logger, doting father, and loving husband named, appropriately, Joe Braven. At the time, Momoa was coming off his star-making role as warrior Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones and his first appearances in the DCEU as fish-charmer Arthur Curry. But Braven, a low-budget thriller where Moma's character hunts Canadian drug dealers with a bow and arrow, was before the first Aquaman solo adventure really launched him into a different celebrity stratosphere. Produced by Momoa himself, it showed that the actor had a nuanced understanding of how his gruff yet sensitive persona could fit in the larger B-movie universe.
In some ways, Sweet Girl, another splintered family unit genre movie, feels like the wild-eyed, conspiracy-peddling older sibling to Braven's more rugged outdoorsman. Momoa serves as a producer here, like he did on Braven, and again he's cast as a dad-in-crisis: His character, boxing-enthusiast Ray Cooper, has a charming daughter named Rachel (Isabela Merced of Dora and the Lost City of Gold) and a soon-to-be-dead wife (Adria Arjona) going through painful cancer treatment, which Ray struggles to pay for. Miraculously, there's an experimental drug that could help her, but the possible remedy gets pulled from the market by greedy drug company CEO Simon Keeley (Justin Barth). The battle lines are drawn: Only the brute force of Jason Momoa can take down Big Pharma.
The vagaries of the situation scan as authentic enough—drug companies often mess with people's lives for profit—but the specifics of the situation, concocted by writers Philip Eisner (Event Horizon) and Gregg Hurwitz (The Book of Henry), are wildly over the top. For example, as his wife clings to life in the hospital, Ray doesn't just catch an interview of Keeley defending his company's shady activities on CNN. No, Ray calls into the show, gets on air, and delivers a solemn death threat to the ultra-smarmy executive. Like many ham-fisted message-driven action movies, the ideas are delivered with all the subtlety of an elbow to the head, and there's a certain amount of fun to be had in such unrepentantly goofy storytelling.
When his wife inevitably passes away and Ray begins to take his revenge on the corporate evildoers that screwed him over, the movie toggles between different stylistic registers, often landing somewhere between the slick on-the-run mystery-solving of The Fugitive and the chaotic hand-to-hand brawling of a Taken movie. (Channeling Clive Owen in the first Bourne adventure, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo plays a stern, no-nonsense assassin who shows up whenever the movie needs a shot of suspense or conflict.) As far as action thriller pastiches go, there are certainly worse sources to draw from, even if you wish director Brian Andrew Mendoza, a producer and the cinematographer on Braven, didn't feel the need to chop up the fight scenes in such an aggressive manner. Still, Momoa knows how to sell this material, grimacing when struck down and luxuriating in his own physical prowess when he gets the upper hand.
Unfortunately, Sweet Girl grows more tiresome as it barrels towards its conclusion. There's a bizarre final twist that some viewers will likely take issue with or simply roll their eyes at; without getting into spoiler territory, I'll say I found the conceit of the twist to be clever and in line with the themes of the story. The larger problem is one of tone and scale, with each subsequent action beat landing with less and less potency as the movie attempts to rev the narrative engine. No amount of pounding orchestral music and swooping helicopter shots can elevate the film's often dreary mix of car chases, fist fights, and terse confrontations.
Momoa and Merced anchor the drama in real emotions, lending the grief and sorrow of the often ludicrous scenarios a degree of psychological depth, but the movie's plot gears simply grind them both down by the end. It might leave you yearning for the relative simplicity of Joe Braven's more pared back brand of vengeance.