Whenever I watch a gritty action movie, I wonder if we could tell that story through the eyes of a real person. Someone who sees all the destruction and is genuinely affected by it instead of that person just being another blip on the screen as guns fire or cars blur by.
And so, I give She Rides Shotgun a whole lot of credit for trying to do this to some degree, even if it doesn’t quite find a perfect balance between showing us this human side of things and also giving us a fairly typical thriller. We open with Polly, a ten-year-old waiting for her mom after school when her just-out-of-prison father, Nathan, shows up and hurries her off. We learn her mother has been murdered, which we may or may not suspect was at Nathan’s hands, although we probably don’t suspect it, given he’s played by Taron Egerton. Nathan is on the run from a white supremacist gang he apparently had to join to survive in prison, and they’re out for his blood, and Polly’s.
As far as the thriller side of things goes, it’s effective, if a bit silly, with the usual secret big bad guy who runs the whole show and Nathan not being able to trust anyone, although the big bad is played by John Carroll Lynch, so no complaints there. And it’s shot such that the action feels real and painful, notwithstanding an enormous gunfight toward the end that’s all quite a bit too much.
But every single thing involving Polly is nothing short of devastating. She’s witness to repeated horrors and danger and suffering, and the young actor, Ana Sophia Heger, absolutely kills every second on screen. These are things no one, and especially no child, should ever experience, and we can tell the real effects it’s all having on her. There may be an uncomfortable, and probably unavoidable, tension between this and the more conventional thriller we’re seeing, but the movie never pretends what’s happening to Polly is not truly traumatic—up to, and including, what turns out to be a gut punch of a final shot.
She Rides Shotgun is in theaters August 1st.
