“She Rides Shotgun” stars Ana Sophia Heger as Polly, a young girl who does not cling to the side of a carriage while wielding a blunderbuss, as she blasts away masked bandits who want to steal her Western Union packages. This is a shame. But one of the hardest lessons we have to learn in life is that some titles are only metaphors. (I’ll never forget the day I saw “Skyfall.” I should have left my umbrella at home.)
Instead, Polly is a little girl who waits and waits and waits after school, but her mom never picks her up. Instead her father, Nate (Taron Egerton), trundles along in a ramshackle car with a freshly busted window, telling her everything is alright, yes he did just get out of prison, and no, her mom isn’t coming. Red flag! Red flag! Red flag!
Polly is terrified but conflicted, because Nate’s still her dad. It’s only when she sees their picture in the news that she realizes something is wrong. And it’s only after she calls the cops that she realizes something else is wrong: Nate didn’t kill her mother, white supremacists meth dealers did, and now every drug dealer, drug addict, racist and/or corrupt cop in the country wants them dead.
That’s a strong set-up for a thriller, and “She Rides Shotgun” could have taken it in many directions. There’s the action forward version, where Nate kills about a thousand people using only his fists. There’s the depressing version where our heroes, and by extension the world at large, are doomed by this country’s rapid downfall into hatred and dehumanization. Instead we get a tactful fusion: a serious thriller that earns its action through excellent performances and thoughtful writing.
Egerton and Heger are both magnetic performers, so it makes sense that they cling together. Even when Polly is frightened of her father, she’s drawn to his kind eyes and pays attention when he shows her the right way to beat a man with a baseball bat. Nate can’t help but feel connected to his daughter when they plan a gas station robbery and he promises to get her a Snickers. Good ol’ shared interests. But he’s also horrified the first time Polly picks up a gun. He’s put her in an impossible situation, and no amount of family bonding can compensate for his recklessness.
That impossible situation probably deserved more explanation though. The plot of “She Rides Shotgun” involves Nate making friends with white supremacists so he can survive in prison. He’s only targeted for death when he betrays them. Nate is quick to tell anyone who’ll listen that no, he was never actually a white supremacist, and the weary and wise Detective Park (Rob Yang) lets him off the hook because in the big house you have to compromise your morality to survive. Yet no matter how hard this film protests that Nate was the “good” kind of white supremacist gang member, it comes across like a hand wave, and the hand doesn’t even wave for a long time. For a lot of the movie we just don’t know how bad Nate really is, so we can only focus on Polly, the only character in the film whose soul is untarnished.
That could be an example of complex filmmaking. It plays more like the script has to bend over backwards to eat its cake and have it too. The important thing, apparently, is that Nate has free reign to kill anyone targeting him because they must be fundamentally bad people by association. That logic just doesn’t seem to apply to him. It doesn’t ruin the film by any stretch. This one part is just a wee wonky.
However, the fact that I’m hemming and hawing over the screenplay’s vague internal conflict over one off-screen backstory and the inciting incident should tell you something. It should tell you that everything else about the movie works. Egerton is grand. Heger is a genuine discovery. Yang captivates. The film flows excitingly from one riveting scene to the next, occasionally spiking the punch with a stirring car chase or shoot out. But it gets even more mileage out of the heroes and their relationships.
Nick Rowland has crafted an excellent, mature thriller, full of sharp filmmaking choices that tell the story without shrieking, “Hey mom, watch me dive!” There’s a confidence to “She Rides Shotgun” that many other movies can’t match, as though the filmmakers always knew exactly where to put their camera and how long to let it roll. The story may have one or two bugs in it. The storytelling never met a bug in its life.
