Delayed Reaction: Sweet Girl

Premise: A man gets revenge on the pharmaceutical company execs who withheld a treatment that could’ve saved his wife.

 

I assume that anyone even vaguely interested in this movie would’ve seen it by now, since it’s been out for long enough for the Netflix algorithms to quit spotlighting it. Given that, I won’t talk around the big twist of the movie, since I believe it creates a problem throughout the film. The movie is actually about Isabela Merced getting the revenge and imagining her dead father is doing it. I’m all for a good twist. The caveat is that it shouldn’t get in the way of the rest of the movie. The Keyser Soze reveal in The Usual Suspects works because it doesn’t change anything about how the story is told or how the characters interact. I don’t feel like the film is talking around something the whole time.

 

Sweet Girl doesn’t feel right for most of the movie. My notes pretty early on point out that Jason Mamoa doesn’t fight like he’s played by Jason Mamoa. You bring him into a movie like this to be a brute. He’s all muscles and size. Years of similar films have conditioned me to not ask why I’m expected to think a random everyman is built like Jason Mamoa or the Rock or Dave Bautista. The tradeoff is that when they do start beating up bad guys, they can deliver the kind of ass-kicking they look like they could deliver. When Sweet Girl has Mamoa fighting like - well, it turns out - like a teen girl, it doesn’t look right. And it’s a waste of Mamoa. No offense, but I’m watching this movie for Mamoa’s physicality, not his acting range. Yes, the reveal that he isn’t real did fool me. I wasn’t expecting that, and it does explain a lot of my questions and concerns about earlier parts of the film. It doesn’t solve them though. Even if there’s a reason for it, I still had to watch an hour of bad fight scenes with Jason Mamoa and story beats carefully constructed to conceal a twist.

 

Al that said, once the twist is revealed, I started to like it more. It’s still a silly and ridiculous movie, but suddenly, I’m watching action sequences designed to maximize Isabela Merced’s strengths and the story is free to talk directly about things. Then again, I’m probably not watching something advertised as an Isabela Merced action movie, so maybe there’s no way to get this movie right.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend