A bonkers, Jason Momoa-sized twist

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

Those are the first words Jason Momoa utters in Sweet Girl, the new action-thriller from Netflix, and oh how prophetic they are. Just not in any of the ways you might expect.

Sweet Girl is a difficult movie to talk about, in part because the central mystery is fundamentally messy and haphazardly pieced together. Trailers have suggested it’s a story about Jason Momoa’s grieving dad, Ray Cooper, bringing his mighty punching fists to bear on Big Pharma after his wife dies of cancer in our broken U.S. healthcare system.

That’s basically accurate. Amanda Cooper might have survived if she’d been able to receive a fictional cancer-decimating wonder drug, but the company that created it set a price that’s far out of reach for the average working citizen. Worse, it seems that same company also maneuvered to block a lower-priced generic equivalent from reaching the market.

It’s enough legalized criminality and basic injustice to send anyone over the edge. So when Ray starts in with a public death threat against the company’s CEO and an at-home conspiracy investigation, it’s a believable downward spiral. Even with his young daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced) in the picture, trying to pull her dad back from the brink.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

Rachel is the titular Sweet Girl, and she’s the source of much consternation through much of the movie’s two-hour running time. Why is this morally grounded young girl, who seems like she’s on the cusp of becoming a woman, so devoted to her dad’s increasingly dark, dangerous quest? And why is Ray letting grief turn him so completely into a rage monster when he still has a living family that needs him?

Sweet Girl doesn’t spend much time pondering these questions out loud, or delving into its central characters at all, really. The story has a dark purpose of its own, and the script banks on viewers simply buying into an action-fueled plot that feels like a mash-up of The Fugitive and Léon: The Professional until all is eventually revealed. (And for what it’s worth, all is eventually revealed.)

Unfortunately, the script from Philip Eisner (Event Horizon), Gregg Hurwitz (The Book of Henry), and Will Staples (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3) sacrifices too much exposition on the altar of its greater purpose. It just doesn’t work. Sweet Girl is a mystery at heart, and truly great mysteries are propelled by rich characters and clues that eventually fall into place like puzzle pieces.

Some of those key pieces are still missing by the time the credits roll. There are multiple layers of villainy at work in the plot, but Sweet Girl never does a clear enough job of peeling them back, opting instead to dump major revelations about what’s been really going on into the final 10 or 15 minutes. Ray and Rachel, meanwhile, are such underdeveloped enigmas that the story’s emotional journey lacks teeth.

The real problem, though, is the twist.

Something happens about 90 minutes in that completely flips our understanding of Sweet Girl as a filmed story. It’s a sharp turn on par with the Keyser Söze reveal in The Usual Suspects, except there’s still a whole half-hour more of movie to go after the truth comes out. Even hinting at that truth here would completely undermine the impact Sweet Girl sets out to have.

I’m not going to blow up its spot, but it’s still important to understand the impact of such a stunning turnabout. All of Sweet Girl‘s narrative flaws are a direct product of the big secret at the story’s heart. It’s not just exposition that gets sacrificed on the altar of some greater purpose; it’s also basic coherency.

Merced’s performance is the low-key highlight of “Sweet Girl”.
Credit: CLAY ENOS/NETFLIX © 2021

The writers clearly set out to explore a truly wild idea for a mystery, and to their credit it almost works. The late revelation and extended finale that follows are captivating in ways that the rest of the movie doesn’t come close to matching. It’s always fun to watch charismatic Momoa knock his way through action-heavy set pieces, but even that becomes secondary once Sweet Girl reveals herself.

The trade-off isn’t worth it though. For 90 whole minutes — an entire feature-length movie!! — we’re served a lumbering and increasingly confusing story involving multiple villains, a deepening conspiracy, and subtext-as-commentary — which fades rapidly into the background — on Big Pharma and the rotten U.S. healthcare system.

It’s a heavy lift for any movie to manage, and especially one that hinges its success on a bonkers twist. Instead of letting Momoa and Merced’s natural talents as performers carry us through to the big reveal, Sweet Girl opts for information overload and jarring bursts of improvised action as Ray, a blue collar Pittsburgh guy who counts boxing among his hobbies, takes on groups of men who have combat training and big, fancy guns.

Momoa’s impressive physique may be handy in a fight, but it can’t save us from an unmoored plot that doesn’t build up enough of a foundation to earn its sudden 180. He and Merced, whose performance and presence is the real highlight of Sweet Girl, try their best. But the movie that unfolds around them has other plans, and they — just like us — are simply along for the ride.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Ray knows it as police and FBI close in from all sides. But we who have seen his whole story play out know it, too. Sweet Girl‘s brazen attempt at mindfuckery isn’t without its thrills, but those thrills depend far too much on a wild twist making sense in this misshapen mess of a story.

Sweet Girl comes to Netflix on Aug. 20.

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