Movie Review: 'Sweet Girl' Starring Jason Momoa

Sweet Girl doesn’t fail due to lack of commitment. Leads Jason Momoa and Isabela Merced each appear deeply committed to their roles. The unfortunate failure of Sweet Girl comes because what these wonderful performers committed to was far too silly to warrant their commitment. Sweet Girl turns on a twist so clumsily executed and poorly thought out that it renders any goodwill the movie might get from the performances moot.

Sweet Girl stars Jason Momoa as Cooper, an MMA brawler and loving husband and father. Cooper’s life is thrown into chaos when his beloved wife, played by Adria Arjona, finds out she has cancer and is dying. Cooper has done everything he can to try to care for her, leveraging every last bit of their lives to pay for treatment but nothing is working. Then, a seeming miracle occurs. The doctor in charge of his wife’s care says that she has qualified for a promising experimental treatment.

That’s when things actually take a turn for the worse, sadly. Not long after the doctor indicated that Cooper’s wife might live, he’s forced to break the news that the company marketing the experimental drug has pulled the drug off the market at the last moment. This is a death sentence for Cooper’s wife who passes on soon after. A devastated Cooper vows revenge on the CEO of the company played by Justin Bartha.

6 months later, Cooper has not followed through on his threat to kill the CEO but it’s still on his mind when he gets a call from a reporter. The reporter claims to have evidence that the company pulled the drug off the market for profit reasons and knew that it meant people like Cooper’s wife would die. The reporter needs a hook for the otherwise dry story about a paper trail. He needs Cooper to tell the story about his wife dying and the promise made and broken to get her the experimental drug.

Cooper is dubious that the story will work but he agrees to meet the reporter. After some cloak and dagger shenanigans, Cooper finally meets the reporter in a subway car. But, before the reporter can talk more about the evidence he claims to have, the reporter is murdered right in front of Cooper and his daughter who had unknowingly trailed behind her dad. Cooper attacks the assassin and is himself stabbed in the process.

Two years later, we aren’t sure if Cooper is alive or dead. We see his daughter, Rachel (Isabela Merced) training MMA style just like her father and proving more than capable of protecting herself. She’s been tracking the CEO and the company but mostly her father has stayed on the case. Cooper is alive maybe, we see him, that’s for sure. He has a new motivation to track down the CEO but it will involve possibly killing people, so he’d prefer his daughter not try to follow him this time.

That’s the gist of Sweet Girl and I have danced around the ‘twist’ as best I can. It’s such a bad idea and the way it is executed sinks the whole movie. But there are other problems such as pacing, Sweet Girl moves too quickly through the early conspiracy plot and leaves far too much running time late in the movie. By the time we reach what appears to be the third act, there is still an hour of runtime yet and the big villain of the movie is still to be revealed.

Some scenes make no sense in the context of the twist, such as the opening scene which is a flash forward to the twist, perhaps, hard to say. The movie jumps back in time to introduce the family, and the cancer and then builds back to the framing device which is paid off with far too much time left in the movie. From there the movie lurches and stumbles to an incredulous nonsense ending, seemingly plucked out of the ‘I think this is what audiences want’ box.

It’s a shame because both Jason Momoa and Isabel Merced are quite good in Sweet Girl. I bought in on the family dynamic and the heartbreak of their loss. Momoa’s grief at the death of his wife, set in the hospital hallway while his daughter is left alone with her mother, is a genuinely powerful moment. Sadly that moment of deep involvement is quickly undone by the fumbled conspiracy plot and that silly, silly twist.

Sweet Girl debuted on Netflix on August 20th, 2021.