'Sweet Girl': Jason Momoa Takes On The Pharma Industry & Loses... Badly [Review]

Is it harder to picture Jason Momoa getting manhandled by dudes in a fight, or to buy the wacky plot device excusing his manhandling? “Sweet Girl,” Brian Andrew Mendoza’s directorial debut, leaves it to the audience to choose their own misgiving.

From a macro perspective, the whole enterprise is baffling. Momoa should not get tossed around like a ragdoll. He’s the one who generally does the tossing. This is the essence of Momoa, who, even when he took a break from his strict authoritarian diet and workout routine post-“Aquaman” and gained what scads of Twitter schmucks dubbed a “dad bod,” looks as if he skipped “birth” and instead burst forth fully formed from Zeus’ noggin. It’s true that Momoa often contrasts his impressive physique with soft fashion choices; this is the formula that makes him a paragon of modern masculinity, big and strong but kind and gentle. We love watching him whammy bad guys as much as we dig his fundamental cuddliness.

“Sweet Girl” mucks the formula up. As Ray Cooper, a father and husband on a rampage following the passing of his wife, Amanda, (Adria Arjona), Momoa is big, strong, kind, and gentle, but his energy is terribly muddled by the movie’s ponderous driving theme as well as its frankly insane third-act twist. Movies like this don’t need twists. They need tension. That’s their oxygen. It took a three-man screenwriting squad (Phillip Eisner, Gregg Hurwitz, and Will Staples) to deprive a basic working-class revenge drama of suspense and plain old sense and to make Momoa feel out of place. Granted, Momoa is a giant. There’s something comical about a large and ferociously bearded man hiding in plain sight, stalking his enemies, evading capture by the FBI, except there’s a ludicrous baked-in reason why no one notices him posing as a waiter at swanky museum auctions where he doesn’t belong.

Maybe a more straightforward version of “Sweet Girl” would work better than the one Mendoza has directed here. Ray and his daughter, Rachel (Isabela Merced), grieve the loss of Amanda to cancer, a wound rubbed with salt given that Amanda’s life might have been saved if pharma bro Simon Keeley (Justin Bartha) hadn’t blocked production of a generic version of his life-saving cancer drug. Heartbroken and enraged, Ray swears to avenge Amanda’s death while Rachel tries and fails to keep him on a good path; the pair end up entangled in a conspiracy that goes beyond Keeley, with hitmen on their trail and well-meaning FBI agent Sarak Meeker (Lex Scott Davis) not far behind.

“Sweet Girl” finds its best footing in character moments between Momoa and Merced, who make a charming father-daughter team and whose chemistry gives the impression that the film missed opportunities by not asking them to interact more. It’s their story, after all: The story of how they, two regular folks with regular concerns, were let down by the pharmaceutical industry and by the political forces in place that are supposed to protect them from the unfeeling grind of capitalism’s gears. Mendoza’s mistake, which is mostly Eisner, Hurwitz, and Staples’ mistake, is only imagining Momoa as an action star instead of a performer with heart. People like the Coopers are real. The further “Sweet Girl” takes its plot and looney “gotcha” reveal, the further away it gets from those people and from their tragedies. Practical action filmmaking can mix with social commentary, historically speaking, but those two sides don’t gel here.

No one should ask “Sweet Girl” to be something it isn’t, namely an affecting drama about pharmaceutical evils. For one, it’s self-serious enough as is. But there’s a vast difference between self-seriousness and taking the subject matter seriously. “Sweet Girl” leans towards blue-collar conceit. Maybe it was just Momoa’s time to follow the footsteps of his peers—Chris Hemsworth, Mark Wahlberg, Karen Gillan—and star in one of Netflix’s many middling action originals. It’s not like he doesn’t have better things to do with his time or his talent. Conjuring a scenario where he’s starved for work is nigh impossible. Still, we’re better off with him in the lead role than we might’ve been. If “Sweet Girl” has a misguided sense of what to do with his presence, at least he has presence. That’s more than can be said for the meaty themes the movie bungles juggling. [D+]