She Rides Shotgun

If ever there were a middling thriller that deserved the meritorious distinction of More Than Middling, it is Nick Rowland’s “She Rides Shotgun,” taking the sensational and/or sentimental set-up of a pre-teen girl on the run with her dad from bad dudes and imbuing it with real warmth and weight. Based on a novel by Jordan Harper, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, it’s as if one evening he watched “Commando” (1985), itself a minor masterpiece of its own genre, in which a dad sets out to rescue a daughter taken hostage by warlords, and wondered, what if I tried to write this as a novel without winking? I haven’t read the book, but the movie succeeds, not simply through commitment but care, paying attention to its people, or at least, its two most important people. In fact, if “She Rides Shotgun” has a problem, it’s a nice problem in so much as its central relationship is so well drawn that everything else can’t help but pale in comparison.

“She Rides Shotgun” begins with 11-year-old Polly (Ana Sophia Heger) being picked up from school by her dad, Nate (Taron Egerton), her estranged dad, that is, which is not wholly communicated to us through dialogue but context clues like his jittery air and a car that has clearly been stolen. Indeed, in this introduction, the camera remains yoked to Polly’s point-of-view, foreshadowing how “She Rides Shotgun” prominently sticks to her perspective, refusing to make the audience omniscient for long stretches as we learn new information at the same time as her. When she phones Detective Park (Rob Yang) after seeing news on television about her disappearance, it’s striking how much we are in her same headspace, unsure if he really is someone she can trust. Nate, it turns out, has just been released from prison where he ran afoul of a white supremacist gang that now wants him and his family dead. And because the gang has its tenterhooks in the local police, Nate determines his only option is to pick up Polly and make a run for the border. 

Rowland frequently deploys a handheld camera to evoke Polly’s POV, though the device never becomes overbearing in its destabilization, and still captures the feel of the massive and empty southwestern landscape which only makes this small girl feel that much smaller. Though it’s clear Polly has been forced to grow up in a hurry, more aware than oblivious adults might realize, she always feels true to her age as Rowland is careful to emphasize the last few embers of innocence still in the process of burning out. When Nate briefly seeks refuge with an old friend, the way the camera catches sight of Polly marveling over an illuminated fish tank before showing her perspective as she watches the adults talking effectively recounts these dueling ideas. Nate, meanwhile, is both a contrast to Polly and an echo of her, loving if emotionally immature but also her determined physical protector. And though the script embeds the idea of these actions as Nate’s shot at redemption, Egerton’s air makes it feel less obvious than that, like Nate is operating from nothing more than instinctual desperation.

For all its honesty, though, “She Rides Shotgun” still occasionally pulls a punch. A car chase with police in pursuit is punctuated by Polly’s almost ecstatic laugh, opening a can of worms that even this movie isn’t ready to explore, letting it lie there for a moment and then backing off. This sequence, though, scored to Denver Luna’s “Underworld,” demonstrates how Rowland gives the genre machinations some stylistic punch, furthered in John Carroll Lynch’s delicious villainous turn which feels as deliberately broad as Egerton and Polly’s feel purposely three-dimensional. And that’s what “She Rides Shotgun” can’t quite square. As the narrative begins crosscutting between Polly and Nate, Detective Park, and the gaggle of bad guys, it’s self-evident the latter two storylines don’t have the depth of the former, meaning that, oddly, the final product feels disproportionate despite being consistently good. Yet, even if these subplots pale to the main one, they enhance it, nevertheless, the world’s harshness juxtaposed against the straining hope of Polly. You see it best in the final scene, scored to synth-pop band CHVRCHES’ “Clearest Blue,” where the camera recounts Polly in close-up as she learns a new dance from some new friends, trying to shake it off, though Heger’s facial expressions suggest that shaking it off is not always so simple.