![]() Also with Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Amy Brenneman, Adria Arjona, Justin Bartha, Raza Jaffrey and Lex Scott Davis. In their quest for justice, they soon run afoul of not only big pharma, but the FBI, hit men, reporters, and congressmen. Read our parents’ guide below for details on sexual content, violence & strong language.Ī man (Jason Mamoa) and his daughter (Isabela Merced) seek revenge for the wrongful death of his wife at the hands of a corrupt pharmaceutical giant. Suffice to say “Sweet Girl” winds up leaving quite the sour taste.Why is “Sweet Girl” rated TV-MA? The TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board rating indicates that “this program is specifically designed to be viewed by adults and therefore may be unsuitable for children under 17.” The evaluation includes many fight scenes with hand-to-hand combat, stabbings and shootings that end with the death of several people with blood shown, a woman dies from cancer, several arguments, discussions of corruption and big pharma, and 8 F-words and other strong language. Isabela Merced is a good actress with a long career ahead of her, but she’s miscast here, and I don’t want to give away even a hint of a spoiler, so we’ll just leave it at that. Momoa is more than serviceable as a regular good guy whose efforts to avenge his wife’s death create a world of chaos that puts himself and his daughter in danger. Through it all, characters spout lines such as, “You have no idea what you’re getting into,” and “I’m not putting you in danger,” and “It wasn’t right, what happened to you.” There’s another extended shootout at a motel where Ray and Rachel seem to be the only guests. There’s a shootout just downstairs from a fancy fundraiser but nobody seems to hear anything. There’s a brutal and bloody and deadly encounter on the subway in which the passengers just seem to conveniently disappear. “Sweet Girl” is one of those movies that often seems to be set in a vacuum. The FBI has targeted Ray as a murder suspect and then there’s that aforementioned hitman who will stop at nothing to kill Ray, and there’s a lot of bickering between Ray and Rachel, with Ray sometimes telling Rachel to get out of the car and sometimes telling Rachel to stay in the car, and either way, they’re in way over their heads. This is when “Sweet Girl” makes the full segue to action movie, as Ray (usually with Rachel accompanying him) keeps getting into violent confrontations, even leaving behind a corpse or two on more than one occasion. That’s when Ray gets a call from an investigative journalist (Nelson Franklin) who says he’s THIS close to blowing the lid off a wide-ranging conspiracy involving Bioprime and bribes and kickback schemes, and this thing could go all the way to Washington, as conspiracies often do. Six months later, the medical bills keep piling up, and both Ray and 18-year-old Rachel are dealing with some serious anger issues. Amanda is battling cancer and it appears all hope is lost when word comes about a miracle drug called Sparrow, which is a generic and thus much more affordable version of an obscenely expensive drug manufactured by the pharmaceutical giant known as Bioprime. Ray is a working-class guy in Pittsburgh who manages a gym for fighters and is married to the kind and lovely Amanda (Adria Arjona), with whom he has a teenage daughter named Rachel (Isabela Merced). ![]() Momoa, still sporting his “Aquaman”-level flowing locks and big beard and still quite the hulking and formidable onscreen presence, provides voice-over narration for the story, with his Ray Cooper character spouting such wisdom as, “The past is like a dream … there are memories that shape us, molding us into what we become.” Yeah, pretty much, big fella. We’re not buying what the script is selling, not for a hot second. It’s a scene with echoes of the famous De Niro/Pacino coffee shop conversation in “Heat,” but that’s the last time we’re ever going to compare these two films because it’s a fleeing moment of interest in an otherwise by-the-book thriller that spirals down the rabbit hole until all is revealed - and that’s when “Sweet Girl” makes the transition from subpar action movie to the completely and utterly ludicrous. They have a quiet, intense conversation in which the hitman tells a harrowing story from his childhood, after which Ray outlines the three ways in which this thing between the two of them will eventually end. Rated R (for some strong violence, and language). Netflix presents a film directed by Brian Andrew Mendoza and written by Gregg Hurwitz and Philip Eisner.
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