Sweet Girl Review

We don't need a movie to tell us the horrors of cancer. We also don't need one this this professionally made, frustrating, and, for long stretches anyway, entertaining. Yet here we are, with Netflix's Jason Momoa action thriller "Sweet Girl."

Playing Ray Cooper who's wife succumbing to the awful disease, finds himself caught up in the politics when the promised miracle drug is taken off the market. He calls in to a news report with makers BioPrime's Simon Keeley (Justin Bartha), a scene without any of the succinct grace of that iconic Liam Neeson exchange in "Taken," but then again, our star Jason is no Liam. He lacks the cool detachment of everyone's favorite Irishman, instead raging across the screen like a pitbull with a toothache.

Mere scenes later, the corporate stooge is found dead in the back halls of a UNICEF gala. Now Ray and his daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced) are on the run from both the cops and assassins who seem to know their whereabouts before the police do.

All your obligatory scenes follow, but director Brian Andrew Mendoza punctuates ordinary material with visceral action scenes. The best ones use Jason's physicality as an asset; he's no "former CIA agent" or whatever, just some random kickboxing father and widow. His brute force has the hired gunmen change their approach to conflict, giving the fights a sort of unchoreographed personality that's refreshing in the wake of all the John Wick copycats that's flooded the cinema.

Yet there's this unshakeable feel that, for as "everyman" as Ray the character is, he's still played by the foreboding Jason Momoa. He just isn't convincing as anything but a superhero, and in the more dramatic moments, his emotional range is angry and more angry. There either isn't enough time watching his fall into madness, or he simply cannot handle the thematic subtly the role occasionally asks for. Sadly, I think it's both.

The film's big twist is unsatisfying and unconvincing, an awkward revelation that belittles the plot's otherwise simplistic tone. But it did catch me by surprise, leaving in a sort of suspense as to where the rest of the runtime would go. Unfortunately, it is a most anticlimactic climax, a cop-out by screenwriters Philip Eisner and Gregg Hurwitz who couldn't think of a better way to end things than to pillage other pictures; you know the kind, where the actual villain is finally exposed to the movie-world not by the competency of law enforcement because they don't shut their traps when clearly the protagonist is recording!

All these issues throw the balance of the finished product awry, because for as fun as the fisticuffs are, their potency is diluted by a pedestrian execution of some rather basic concepts. The whole thing's about cancer after all, and no one seems to understand that.