Sweet Girl
NetflixSweet Girl is a product of inevitabilities. It was inevitable that Jason Momoa would star in an action feature, and it was inevitable that it’d be rudimentary at best. As this brief opening shows, the ineffective throes of the action genre are painted thick and fast under the watchful, generic eyes of Brian Andrew Mendoza. Helicopters swirl around the rebellious hero, and as he plummets himself into the water with cries of reservation from the police around him, audiences are seconds away from hearing Momoa talk them through pockets of narration as they flashback into the past to figure out how and why he got himself into such a predicament.
Slow-motion soon follows, an immediate parallel to the fast-paced action of a few seconds before. Smart thinking from the man in the directing chair, but completely useless both narratively and emotionally. Mendoza cannot engage with the story because there is little, if anything, compelling about it. A happy lifestyle turned foul for Cooper (Momoa) is necessary, but handled with little care. Momoa pontificates in a voiceover that makes as much sense as the medical jargon thrown around to build up the emotional crux of the story. Either way, they are not worth investing in, not just because they are performed on a level closer to melodrama than considerate, touching storylines, but because Sweet Girl is something everyone has already seen before.
There is room to grow the action genre, but with such a banal setup, it would take a real miracle for the action to present anything that could salvage this. Sweet Girl has topics of medical care and costliness, which go in inevitable directions of criticism. But the bark is harsher than the bite for Mendoza, who follows these messages up with absolutely nothing at all. He signals for outrage and then doesn’t bother to incorporate such a feeling in the underlying narrative. If he does, then he does so with an intense degree of subtlety, to the point where it is unidentifiable and completely wasted. But that is Sweet Girl in a nutshell, a film whose most interesting points are diluted. Turning a potential thrill ride with an actively engaging twist into a sudden realisation from audiences that the twist was unnecessary, because the project should have just displayed the twist from the start. It is a redundant change in pace that showcases both a lack of confidence and a deflection of originality.
Decent enough to give Momoa a step towards that inevitable stay in the spotlight, but not good enough to be worth watching. Sweet Girl has a soppy, romanticised start, a dull middle section and a final third that both understand it has nothing to lose by throwing everything at an audience but also has everything to lose if it goes too far one way or the other. Sweet Girl spoils itself with a fascinating twist that prompts the “girl power” motif, yet hands the mentality and importance of it off to Momoa. Sweet Girl would have potential if it weren’t so scared of the change it is trying to promote with its sudden turn of events. If anything, that weakens the film, not because Momoa is bad, but the character and the way the story turns out is.