I'm Convinced There's a Good Movie Hiding Somewhere in She Rides Shotgun 

There should be a law that prohibits children from being in action movies. Not to protect them from harm, nor to stop exposing them to violent stories and gory special effects that could harm their developing psyche, nor to ensure they're not being exploited by abusive labour practices. No, the law should be there to protect us viewers from shitty action movies.

Whenever a child character (who is more of a prop most of the time) is written into an action film, the world loses out on a potentially good movie. This take might be too hot to handle, but child actors tend to suck. Of course, there are always exceptions, and we can all think of some amazing performances by people who weren't old enough to be anxious about their next birthday (something for the comments!). Still, for the most part, I try to avoid these movies.

An obscene amount of praise has been directed at Taron Egerton and Ana Sophia Heger for their performances in She Rides Shotgun. Maybe I wanted to be proven wrong, as that isn't a frequent occurrence and I forget the feeling, which is why I watched the movie last weekend.

Egerton plays Nate, an ex-con protecting his 10-year-old daughter Polly (Heger) from some skinheads who want to kill them. Both performances are amazing, but I believe Heger completely steals the show.

However, this alone doesn't make She Rides Shotgun a good movie. In fact, I'd say it's extremely frustrating because hiding under all that predictable action, obscured by that terrible bad guy villain, is a cool ass coming-of-age movie.

I honestly believe that if you take all the Shooty McShooty thriller parts out of this movie and you distill it to the essential father-daughter story, you'd have something way better. I'm not joking when I say there are some Andrea Arnold vibes here.

This suspicion sat with me throughout She Rides Shotgun, but I was only able to see this ideal movie clearly during the last scene. The last shot of the film is Heger playing Just Dance, trying to keep up with the song while tears form on her face. It's a close-up, so we can't really see her dance moves. What we can see is the attention in her eyes as she stares at the screen and cries. It's a great little mix of focus, sadness and just playful dancing. This scene is, without over-selling it, approximately 15 times better than the movie.

I'd watch a movie where young actress Heger gets to do more of that before I'd ever watch She Rides Shotgun 2: Ride Along.

I'm convinced that the seeds for that better movie are already in this one. By cutting out the action thriller aspect and focusing on the relationship between them, you could have an amazing film. The plot could still be Nate and Polly escaping the neo Nazis with the police corruption sub-plot, but all grounded in Polly's perspective.

As it is right now, the best moments in She Rides Shotgun are the inklings of the relationship between Nate and Polly. The reason is two-fold: great acting from both, and the fact that these moments have shit to do with the action thriller plot.

There are three main moments in the film that, I think, could have been the pillars for a much better story.

For example, early on in the movie, Nate teaches Polly to swing a bat with all her strength, how to twist the body, where to hit. At first you think, maybe he loves baseball and wants to teach her. Maybe she likes baseball. As the scene progresses, we learn that he's teaching her to fight. He tells Polly to first aim for the knee and then, when the guy kneels, to hit him in the back of the head.

It's just a cool way to show how he cares for her, what that language looks like for a guy like Nate, and how he needs to shift it a bit to make sure she understands. He sees the world in terms of violence and protection, and he's trying hard to translate that to Polly.

There's a disconnect between them all the time, but this little scene shows how Nate is trying to bridge the gap. That feels like the perfect engine for a coming-of-age.

The second pivotal scene takes place at a diner. Nate counts the money they have and how much it'd cost to escape to Mexico, but he's clearly not very good at basic arithmetic. Polly is trying to talk to him about something else, so she eventually takes a piece of paper and writes out the math for him.

I like how this scene shows the dynamic between them, almost like older brother and younger sister. He's taking care of her physically, but he's clearly not equipped for everything. Polly knows from the very beginning that Nate isn't the smartest or most capable guy, so she doesn't see this lack of arithmetic skill as a bad thing, but we know he's very limited. There's only so much he can do for her, and that'd be the underlying fear he has (in a better movie).

The dialogue here is important because Nate is talking about how he doesn't deserve love, but Polly takes the opportunity to help him out. They're in a fucked up situation, and she does what she can, within reason, to show she's there to help him. In our movie, this would hint at the need to outgrow Nate. Dang, what a banger of a movie we could've had.

The last scene I want to talk about is when Nate robs a convenience store and gets shot, but he still remembers the Snickers bar Polly asked for. This is the scene every review touches on, and for good reason. It has tension, stakes, twists, call backs. For the purposes of this article, it also shows the world Nate is pulling her daughter into.

At one point, a concerned citizen shoots at the car with Polly in it. They manage to escape, and then adrenaline makes them cheer because they just escaped death. Imagine if they'd kept the same energy, the same exact scene plotwise, but in Polly's POV. "My father just took me to rob a store, we got shot, and then he celebrated. He tried to fix it by giving me candy."

I think that little shift would show just how dark their relationship can be. She Rides Shotgun romanticizes the shit out of their relationship when in reality it'd be scary and dangerous as fuck. And they both know it, in their limited ways. Focusing the story on them learning and growing together, but finally realizing he can't take care of her would be so much better.

These moments are already there, but they're wasted. It's like the filmmakers were digging for gold, found oil, and didn't know what to do with this gooey black liquid, so they let it spill on the ground.

Something in me knows that if we had stayed with Polly, She Rides Shotgun could have been an indie darling. By doing that, even some of the scenes that fall flat now would have had a bigger impact. There's a scene early on where Nate fights off a scary Aryan gang dude. It's mostly grappling on the floor and smashing lots of mirrors and decorations. You've seen this fight a hundred times. The scene ends with Nate burning the guy's face off to intimidate the bad guys.

Imagine that same fight from Polly's perspective. Seeing the violence her dad is capable of, how small she must feel at that moment. What she'd do and say when she realizes her father can torture a guy in front of her. For some reason, in the actual movie, they cut away from Polly watching. This was a chance to actually explore how Polly might have felt towards Nate's violent ways. She'd be afraid of him, but she'd still need him. She Rides Shotgun tries to pull it off, but it focuses on the wrong things.

It wasn't all bad. I hadn't seen Egerton in years, and I was reminded of how good he can be. I also discovered Heger, and was pretty amazed. Even better than that, I got a pretty cool last shot. I wish more movies had that.

I don't know why I feel so strongly about this, but I feel like I was cheated out of a good movie. Has that ever happened to you? I was about to turn it off many times, but then I'd get another glimpse of this imaginary movie and I'd keep watching. It played me like a fiddle and now the algorithm thinks it was right. It wasn't, but it could have been.