Netflix: Review of SWEET GIRL: Tricky Twist

August 21, 2021

Ray Cooper's wife Amanda had cancer and was dependent on a certain generic chemotherapeutic drug for her survival. One day, BioPrime, a major pharmaceutical company, pulled this cheaper medicine out of the market in favor of their more expensive one. On a live radio program, Ray threatened to kill the unscrupulous CEO if ever his wife died. Following Amanda's death, Ray went on his promised warpath of revenge against the men he held responsible. Their young daughter Rachel went tagging along by his side. 

The movie was in the a very typical revenge action flick trope featuring the aggrieved hero going on a killing rampage against all the bad people that caused his misery. We've seen the likes of Charles Bronson, Mel Gibson, Liam Neeson, Keanu Reeves and several other action heroes through the years exacting their own brands of violent revenge for harm that had befallen their beloved family members. While the formula is followed faithfully as prescribed, the difference lay in the personality of the hero and his preferred style of justice. 

Charismatic actor Jason Momoa would of course fit the action hero bill based on his imposing physical appearance alone. The former Khal Drogo (on "Game of Thrones") had already proven his chops as an action film hero most emphatically as Aquaman in the DCEU. But this time, in his latest film "Sweet Girl," his character Ray was only a regular guy with no superpowers. But with his gruff and tough exterior, when Ray Cooper stared down his wife's apologetic doctor on the staircase, we all felt how the poor guy's knees bucked. 

It quickly got to a point when all of Ray Cooper's fights were all looking very generic and tiresome already. There was only the constant presence of Ray's teenage daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced, noted for playing Dora the Explorer recently) witnessing all the killings her father did that kept things different. At the 1 hour point, you will look at your watch and wonder why the film needed 50 more minutes to finish, when everything seems all cut and dry. Then with 30 minutes to go, it threw us that unbelievable curve ball we never saw coming. 

You will feel that final half-hour was the director Brian Andrew Mendoza trying his darnedest best to convince us that what just happened could actually happen as they would like us to accept. But no, nothing of that could fly even if we suspended our disbelief. It was already hard enough believing the way things were going on in the first version, then it turned around suddenly to make us believe an alternative version of the story where things actually happened in another decidedly more impossible way. 5/10.