She Rides Shotgun begins with one uneasy situation and ends on quite another, and the two hours in between are anything but comfortable. Somehow, though, director Nick Rowland finds the lodestone of emotion that allows us to follow its young heroine on a very dark, adult journey without too much recourse to sentimentality. The running time is arguably a bit much, but it does give us time to breathe in between set-pieces, and, more importantly, it allows for the underlying emotion to seep through some very familiar genre tropes. The easily-typecast pretty boy Taron Egerton is partly to credit for this, bravely playing a supporting role when he could have forced much more mileage out of his very impressive physical transformation. (A shaved head! Mean-streets abs! Prison tattoos!) Wisely, though, he leaves the spotlight to his co-star Ana Sophia Heger, and their odd-duck chemistry is the motor of Rowland’s thoughtful neo-noir.
The opening scenes do a lot of heavy lifting, as 11-year-old Polly (Heger) is left hanging around outside a school in New Mexico for her mother to arrive. After a long wait, a beat-up car pulls up, with a sinister figure inside. Polly, however, knows all too well who it is. “Are you meant to be here?” she says. The man is her estranged father, Nate (Egerton), and, on his first day out of prison, something heavy has clearly gone down. But what? The seeds of his criminal past are sown quite elegantly, chiefly when Polly points out that the car window has been smashed in (“It’s as good as I could afford,” protests Nate), but the line of cop cars outside her home are a giveaway. Especially when Nate hits the accelerator.
Nate spirits her away to a nondescript motel, where Nate cuts and dyes her dark hair blonde (a bit too professionally, perhaps), and schools her in the art of self-defense with a baseball bat. He also warns her to look for “blue lightning” tattoos; a throwaway line that will become much more significant later. Watching late-night TV, Polly sees the news, which reports the horrifying double homicide of a suburban couple: Polly’s mother and stepfather. Polly recognizes the crime scene and tries to call the police, but somehow she can’t bring herself to shop her own father (“He wouldn’t hurt me,” she sobs).
As would seem pretty obvious from Egerton’s casting, Nate is good-bad but not necessarily evil, and, for the sin of striking back at an underworld kingpin, it is soon revealed that he and his extended family have been greenlit for execution by a shady underworld cartel. This is where Detective John Park (Rob Yang) comes in; Park is on the trail of Slabtown, “the biggest meth lab in the South-West”, and knows that the men behind it are, up to now, untouchable. Which is why, when Park catches up with Nate, he doesn’t arrest him. Instead, he strikes a deal with him to enter this enemy territory. “It’s Troy,” he says. “I need a horse.”
Though it’s pretty clear about what’s right and wrong, She Rides Shotgun is much more ambiguous about its characters’ morality, which — much like Rowland’s impressive debut Calm With Horses — goes up a notch when Park essentially uses the now-cornered Nate as human bait to lure out the higher-ups at Slabtown. “You did this to yourself,” Park says, “I’m just exploiting the situation.” (Which is true, but even so.) And there, in the thick of all this, is Polly, who is getting something of a crash course in all the things that children should never, ever see, and, in one very memorable instance, does something that 99% of movies would never, ever show them doing (clue: it involves a loaded firearm).
Though it does end up in a fairly traditional gunfight, Rowland keeps us guessing as to who will survive and what will be left of them (the murky ratio of clean cops to dirty cops speaks directly to our time, which means that, for a while, it genuinely feels as though anything can happen). What’s most interesting, though, is the effect it’s having on Polly, as she gets drawn further and further into her father’s chaotic life. The film’s most bravura sequence sees Nate holding up a gas station while Polly looks on, horrified, when another customer whips out a gun.
But is there something underneath that horror? The title alludes to it, and though the film satisfies as a twisty, bloody shoot-’em-up, She Rides Shotgun suggests that there might be a vicarious thrill to be had from the sins of the father. By the end, Polly has lived out her own terrifying but exhilarating rollercoaster version of They Live by Night, but, like a Lynne Ramsay movie, there’ll be no catharsis waiting for her when the smoke clears. Instead, we’re left to wonder: how would a kid come back from all that? Though slick and suspenseful, this intelligent thriller is unafraid to address the impact of real-world violence: maybe she won’t.
Title: She Rides Shotgun
Director: Nick Rowland
Screenwriters: Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, from the book by Jordan Harper
Cast: Taron Egerton, Ana Sophia Heger, Rob Yang, Odessa A’zion, David Lyons, John Carroll Lynch
Distributor: Lionsgate
Running time: 2 hrs