The best way to describe Sweet Girl is that it’s a fairly standard action-thriller that’s meant as a jab at the for-profit pharmaceutical industry.

Generally, it was kind of slow to start with when they were setting up the motivations for Jason Mamoa’s character. I feel like this could have been set up in half the time or less and most people would have been able to follow along and sympathise with his motivations.

It also doesn’t help that, due to the limitations of the script and possibly the director, Momoa doesn’t provide a good dramatic performance here. His strength is in the action sequences, which is where more focus needed to be.

I also feel like Sweet Girl would have benefited from just being played straight, without the twist in the last half-hour. That just felt a little cheap to me; as if the movie wanted to come off as being edgier than it really is. The thing is that twists like that haven’t been edgy in at least fifteen years, and realistically, they haven’t been edgy in more like twenty years. Today, they’re mostly just tacky and forced.

It’s kind of a shame that this movie is like this, because I think there is a good movie hidden away somewhere underneath all of this. It’s just that this was a kinda bland execution of a good idea.

Review by LivingWitness