Sweet Girl (2021)

Sweet Girl arrives as a Netflix action thriller in which a Pittsburgh widower named Ray Cooper, played by Jason Momoa, hunts the executives of a pharmaceutical firm called BioPrime who pulled a cancer drug from the market to protect their margins. The film is genuinely angry about this. It lingers on the phone call to a live television interview, the bribery, the congresswoman on the payroll, the ordinary family priced out of survival. Of all the markers of modern social consciousness, this is the one the film wears without apology, and it wears it well enough to be noticed. The action is competent. The rage is legible. The villains are pharmaceutical executives, which is to say the film has chosen a target that requires no defense and offers none.

Then comes the twist, in which the vengeance-seeking father is revealed to be his teenage daughter Rachel, grieving and dissociating, having invented a version of her dead parent to carry the violence she cannot. This makes a young woman the true avenger, which is a genuine gesture, though it functions as a plot mechanism more than a thesis. The dissociative identity material is handled as sensation, a late-act reveal engineered for gasps. Mental illness here is a narrative trapdoor, not a portrait. One does not leave the film with insight into trauma. One leaves with a twist.

The ensemble is notably diverse for the genre, with Momoa, Isabela Merced, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Adria Arjona, Raza Jaffrey and Lex Scott Davis filling out the cast, and the film says nothing whatsoever about any of it. Race is present and unremarked. The topical anger about healthcare access stays thin, subordinate to the fights and the reveal, sermonizing only in passing. Critics found it clichéd and preposterous, and the stunts were praised, which is the correct verdict. A film that wants to indict big pharma and settles for a rooftop chase has made its choice. The choice was the chase.