‘She Rides Shotgun’ Review: A Fierce Taron Egerton Anchors an Overly Familiar but Ultimately Moving Crime Drama
On the surface, Nate, played by in She Rides Shotgun, seems an ideal father. He picks up his 11-year-old daughter, Polly (Ana Sophia Heger), at school. He playfully dyes her hair bright orange. He teaches her the best way to hold a baseball bat. And when they’re driving in his car together, he firmly tells her to put on her seatbelt.
In context, it’s another matter. Newly released from prison, Nate is picking up Polly because her mother and stepfather have just been brutally murdered by people associated with the Aryan gang leader he killed while there. He’s changed her hair color to throw off the criminals and police on his trail. He’s teaching her how to hold the bat not to play ball, but to subdue a potential attacker (hit him in the knees and then, when he falls down, on the top of his head). And the reason he’s telling her to buckle her seatbelt is because he’s engaged in a high-speed car chase.
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She Rides Shotgun
The Bottom Line
A gritty thriller with a beating heart.
Release date: Friday, Aug. 1Cast: Taron Egerton, Ana Sophia Heger, Rob Yang, Odessa A’zion, David Lyons, John Carroll LynchDirector: Nick RowlandScreenwriters: Jordan Harper, Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski
Rated R,
2 hours
Such are the dichotomies of Nick Rowland’s gritty, and I mean gritty, thriller based on Jordan Harper’s award-winning 2017 novel. On one hand, She Rides Shotgun is a New Mexico-set crime drama that makes look like family entertainment. On the other hand, it’s an ultimately touching portrait of the growing bond between a criminal father and the young daughter he’s barely gotten a chance to know.
To say that the film succeeds more in the latter department is no slight. The director, who handled similar territory in 2020’s Calm with Horses, handles the thriller aspects admirably. But the plot dynamics ultimately feel very familiar, including Nate’s betrayal by an ex-girlfriend (Odessa A’zion); the determined cop (Rob Yang) in pursuit who wants his help in shutting down a massive meth lab operation; and the crooked sheriff (John Carroll Lynch) who gets a kick out torturing and murdering people.
Still, the relationship between the violence-prone Nate and the little girl he’s determined to protect, even as she winds up protecting him at times, proves compelling from first moment to last. Much of the credit goes to the performances by the charismatic Egerton, who displays fierce emotional and physical power, and young Heger, projecting the sort of range that most adult actors would envy. Her Polly, fearing for her father as she accompanies him on a hair-raising series of events — including watching him rob a convenience store and get shot in the process, but not before thoughtfully stealing a Snickers bar for her — is the heart and soul of the film.
There are also vivid supporting turns by Yang, cannily underplaying as the lawman who has no compunction about putting Nate in mortal danger at the meth lab (“It’s Troy, I need a horse,” he explains dispassionately) and Lynch, sporting an impressive horseshoe mustache, who is truly fearsome as the sort of bad guy who has no problem retrieving stolen drugs from a man’s stomach while he’s still alive.
While he could have picked up the film’s pacing a little, Rowland reveals a keen visual sense, especially with a great tracking shot involving Heger running frantically in the foreground as an intense gun battle takes place behind her.
