Sweet Girl

"When I became a father, it changed my life because it really made me learn to take care of myself. Prior to that, I didn't give too much thought to that. Everything's to live for after you have babies. I've never learned more in my life by having children. I really don't know what I was doing beforehand. By having children, I felt like my life was then born from that moment on. When I fi¬rst read the script, it really resonated with me as a father. It made me think about what I would do if this were to happen to me and if I was in this situation. What would I do? How would I feel about it? What measures would I take into my own hands? Obviously, we took things really far in the movie, and we have some amazing twists that I've never seen before, but there are some parts of this movie that just rip your heart out, too. - Jason Momoa

The first film of director of photography and producer Brian Andrew Mendoza may surprise viewers as the trailer directs this film towards an action movie in which actor Jason Momoa (Bullet to the Head (2012), Justice League (2017), Aquaman (2018) and soon Dune (2021)) goes to battle with his muscles the contract killers of a pharmaceutical company that will stop at nothing to maximize their profits. Sweet Girl is more of a psychological thriller in which a young teenage girl, Rachel (Isabela Merced, once again perfect), aided by the presence of her father Cooper (Jason Momoa), must not only escape from law enforcement but also from an unscrupulous killer and mercenaries on their trail. 

We follow the journey of Rachel who is devastated by the death of her mother and who decides with her father to take justice into their own hands. Far from lining up action scenes one after the other in an almost mechanical way like in many blockbusters, Sweet Girl turns out to be a film full of excellent ideas that cleverly revisits the paranoid and medical thriller in which ordinary people will find themselves chased and will only be able to rely on themselves to get the truth out. In this sense, it's really interesting to see Jason Momoa in a really worked and psychological role and not a new action movie seen and forgotten. It must be said that this actor proves to be just as accurate in dramatic scenes and far from being a simple mountain of muscle is a real actor.  Far from his role of Aquaman, he proves to be very accurate as a father who helps his daughter and must rebuild himself after the death of his wife.

The chemistry is perfect with the young and adorable Isabela Merced (Transformers: The Last Knight (2017), Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018), Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019)) who finds here a role much more mature than those she was offered until then. She thus confirms real acting qualities and is in a way one of the main reasons to discover this film taking and very effective. In the action and fight scenes, she confirms a real agility and a communicative pleasure to show that women can be just as comfortable in action movies. 

Of course, Sweet Girl could have benefited from being a little shorter and having a more dynamic rhythm, but in fact it easily fulfills its goal of entertaining us intelligently and delivering an effective thriller without being original and without any real surprise. We won't tell you more but we can only advise you to see it at least twice to understand all the subtleties and the numerous clues scattered in it.

Sweet Girl
Directed by Brian Andrew Mendoza
Written by Philip Eisner, Gregg Hurwitz, Will Staples
Produced by Brian Andrew Mendoza, Jason Momoa, Brad Peyton
Starring Jason Momoa, Isabela Merced, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Raza Jaffrey, Lex Scott Davis, Michael Raymond-James, Amy Brenneman
Cinematography : Barry Ackroyd
Edited by Matt Chessé
Music by Steven Price
Production companies : ASAP Entertainment, Pride of Gypsies
Distributed by Netflix
Release date : August 20, 2021
Running time : 110 minutes

Seen on August 16, 2021 (Screener press Netflix)

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