BEFORE: I had to take another day off from watching movies yesterday, so that other people could watch movies - is anybody else finding that a bit ironic, or is it just me? I had to manage special screenings of "Turning Red" and "Lightyear" at the theater, and then there were panels after the shows with animators from Pixar, this was part of a program that celebrates the work of alumni of the school where the theater is, and somehow two 90 minute films, plus panels, required a 12-hour shift for me. Hey, I don't set the schedule, I just work the shifts - still, why did I have to be there at 10:30 am for a 2 pm screening? I'm not complaining, because I need the hours and I need the money, I'm just saying. A 12-hour shift really burns me out, because I'm not a young man any more - but now with New York Comic-Con coming up, and more shifts at the theater, I've got more 12-hour days coming up. It's going to be a very busy October.
Adria Arjona carries over from "Morbius" and I've got 5 days left in the month now, and four films to watch, October 1 is going to be here before you know it, and then, well, you know, the real madness begins.
THE PLOT: A devastated husband vows to bring justice to the people responsible for his wife's death while protecting the only family he has left: his daughter.
AFTER: At some point, I started seeing a lot of connections between this film and "Term Life", they even share one actor - both films are about a father and daughter forced to go on the run, and live on the lam, because he gets framed for murder. And in both cases, the daughter learns survival lessons from her father, and naturally they're both quick studies, because who has time to watch someone spending years of training and such? But then, of course, those are two very different films, there's a divergent point in the stories. Both films are currently streaming on Netflix, but I don't know anybody else who's watched "Term Life", it was a box-office bomb, but in October 2021 "Sweet Girl" was the hottest thing on Netflix, reportedly 68 million accounts had watched at least part of the film.
The film begins with Jason Momoa's character, Ray Cooper, pursued by police and then jumping off of PNC Park in Pittsburgh, into the river below, to escape them. But the story then flashes back to the beginning, when Ray's wife is dying from cancer, and there's word of a promising new medication becoming available. However, a pharmaceutical company blocks the drug from being released affordably, because they want to price it higher and control the market - the CEO of the pharma company is interviewed on the news, arguing with a senator that's lobbying for lower prescription drug prices, and we're led to believe that the drug company CEO is the big villain here, he might as well be named Schmartin Schmkreli. Yeah, this feels like one of those "Law & Order" ripped from the headlines cases at first. Ray calls in to the interview show and threatens the pharma guy, saying that if his wife dies because she couldn't get the medication, he'll hunt the CEO down and kill him.
It was one of those "heat of the moment" things, for sure - but then of course I figured the CEO would turn up dead and the cops would naturally investigate whoever threatened him on the air during that show. That's not what happened, however it WOULD have been a more elegant way to get Ray Cooper and his daughter pursued by the law, and out on the lam. Instead, Ray is contacted months later by a journalist who claims to have evidence of wrongdoing at the pharma company, and he needs Ray to help testify against him - but wouldn't you know it, a hitman arrives on the scene while they're talking, and so there goes the journalist. Ray and his daughter Rachel fight the hit-man, but they lose the fight and the hitman flees the scene.
A few years pass, and Ray's back in the business of tracking down that pharma CEO and making him pay. He infiltrates a charity auction, separates the CEO from the crowd, takes out his bodyguards and then FINALLY has the CEO right where he wants him. However, this leads the story back to where it needed to be, with the CEO dead and the father-daughter team on the run. This is where we all came in, right? Only there are still some twists in the plot, including a big narrative fake-out, and I just hate those. Movies that have fake-outs, like "Fight Club" and "The Sixth Sense" are OK on the first viewing, and maybe they even force a second viewing, but I don't like feeling of having the rug pulled out from under me, narratively speaking. To be told that what we all saw happen wasn't really what WAS happening, well, now the director and I have a problem - you can't tell me one thing is taking place and then tell me later that I didn't see what I saw, that something else was occuring while I was looking at the thing I was supposed to be looking at, it just isn't fair. Now I feel tricked.
Look, it's up to the director, if they want to set up a certain set of expectations and then openly defy them, that's one thing. But a good writer or director doesn't need to resort to trickery, like imagine if Charles Dickens didn't set up "A Tale of Two Cities" properly, and waited until after Sydney Carton got executed in place of Charles Darnay to tell us, oh, yeah, the two men happen to look very much alike, by the way, and earlier, they traded places, but I didn't tell you until after that happened. That would be a really cheap trick to pull on the readers - no, Dickens built up to it in advance, because that's what good writers DO. But there's no proper set-up here in "Sweet Girl", and about a dozen things that don't feel connected to anything else, like the stuffed animal, for example.
And because of this twist, any point that the film was close to making, about the high-cost of medications, about the downside of not having a national centralized medical system, or the corruption of U.S. government officials taking money or stock tips from drug companies, that gets lost in the shuffle here. But there COULD have been relevance in sticking with that side of the story, instead of focusing on what is essentially a giant car-chase. Or the chasing of several cars, a bunch of them do get stolen over the course of the film.
NITPICK POINT: Surely there MUST have been a class-action lawsuit against this pharmaceutical company if they were openly preventing live-saving cancer medications from reaching the public. I realize this wouldn't be a very cinematic course of action, but it probably would have been a more successful one.
Also starring Jason Momoa (last seen in "Dune"), Isabela Merced (last seen in "Instant Family"), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (last seen in "Term Life"), Amy Brenneman (last seen in "The Jane Austen Book Club"), Justin Bartha (last seen in "Driven"), Raza Jeffrey (last seen in "Eastern Promises"), Lex Scott Davis, Michael Raymond-James (last seen in "The Finest Hours"), Dominic Fumusa (last seen in "The Report"), Nelson Franklin (last seen in "Being the Ricardos"), Brian Howe (ditto), Reggie Lee (last seen in "Masked and Anonymous"), Will Blagrove, Milena Rivero, Marie Zoumanigui, Katy M. O'Brian, Cale Schultz (last seen in "Atomic Blonde"), Jake Allyn, Dale Pavinski (last seen in "21 Bridges")
RATING: 5 out of 10 Pittsburgh Pirates fans
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