At an AMC Theatre in NYC yesterday, I went to see She Rides Shotgun, a 2025 crime thriller directed by Nick Rowland, co-written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, based on the 2017 novel of the same name by Jordan Harper.
The film stars Taron Egerton as a ex-con named Nate who formed an alliance with an Aryan white supremacist gang while in prison, only for him to have betrayed the gang in some vague way, and now the gang is out to kill his family. The gang killed his ex-wife and her new husband, and before they can get to his nine-year old daughter, Polly (Ana Sophia Heger), when she's waiting to be picked up after school, Nate pulls up in a car with a broken window and makes her get in the car. She has barely seen her father through her young life, so she hardly knows him, but is at first enjoying the time together in a motel room, where he's teaching her how to swing a bat to hit someone in the knees and back of the head, and changing her hair to disguise her identity. Both things she's seeing as play, while it hints more as his nervousness about being on the run. When she sees a news report about what happened to her mother and that she is a missing child, she freaks and runs and finds a phone to call the cops, then quickly learns how that was the wrong thing to do, as she and Nate are on the run not just from the Aryan gang members, but from corrupt cops who are part of the gang (identifiable by a blue lightning tattoo) as well.
The film has a lot of really good tension in it, and I liked how the film was only hinting at Nate's backstory, where he doesn't want to seem like a monster to his daughter, but that he likely isn't a good guy, and may not be that much better than the gang, just more of a lowlife dirtbag than a violent white supremacist. He fights to protect his daughter, even when he keeps putting her in danger with other killers and corrupt types while on the lam, and she witnesses a lot of trauma throughout the film, which the film's final shot, while moving and touching, insinuates will stick with her long after she's "saved."
Ana Sophia Heger gives an excellent performance as Polly, handling a lot of rough subject matter in this film while often acting without words, her round eyes seeing a lot of shadiness and violence well beyond her years, and picking up quickly on how to defend herself, and seeing her dad more as a scared person beyond his tattooed and shredded physique. She and Egerton's scenes work well together as a father and daughter who barely know each other, and trying to rely on one another while the clock is ticking.
Taron Egerton is almost 36, and has grown out of the young ingenue roles he played in The Kingsman: Secret Service films, and is really good in playing the vulnerability of Nate, a guy whose moral compass is gray, and who can't convince himself that he isn't a monster. When he sees the effect of his violence on Polly, he worries that he is going to ruin her and turn her into being like him, and is remorseful, not wanting her innocence to be tainted by his ugliness, though by the end of the film it's too late for that.
A supporting character role that deserves recognition is Rob Yang as Detective John Park, a cop who is not part of the gang, and is tracking the story and figures out that Nate is not responsible for the murders and is being chased by the gang. He is a morally grey character, using blackmail to get what he wants, but isn't as corrupt as other cops, knowing how to game the system to help people, and often comes off like the smartest person around. Yang carries a lot of quiet magnetism in his role, and is really great in this film.
The veteran character actor John Carroll Lynch appears as Houser, a corrupt cop who is one of the leaders of the Aryan gang, and controls the drug trade and strings up people to torture them for information, killing them afterwards. Lynch in this role is deeply psychotic and intimidating, a long way from when he's played warmer, more cuddlier characters in films like Fargo.
I liked how intense this film was, and how it kept its emotional core about the father-daughter relationship, often people about them trying to trust each other and building a family connection, which helped keep the film more ground among all the other gun battles and car chases going on. I'm glad I checked out this thriller, it feels like a modest sleeper hit.
No comments:
Post a Comment