“This is as good as I can afford right now,” Nate says to Polly, his pre-teen daughter, a kid he barely knows. He’s shown up late to pick her up from school and she’s noticed the broken glass and loose wires that give away how Nate acquired their ride. For Polly, her life has completely changed in this moment, the full extent to which it has changed will become clear soon. For Nate, a violent man fresh out of prison, this is the only life he’s really known. The extent to which this is all his life can be will become evident to him soon as well.
Adapted from the Edgar Award-winning novel by Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun is a rough and tumble crime story about losing everything, finding yourself, and, above all, surviving in a world that seems to be designed to take you out at every turn. That starts with Nate (Taron Egerton) getting himself on the outs with the local white supremacist group Aryan Steel. A greenlight has been put on Nate, his ex-wife, and his daughter Polly (Ana Sophia Heger), so all Nate can do is run. When the film kicks off the ex-wife and her new husband have already been killed. Nate scoops Polly from school and they, and the movie, are off and running. Nate’s world is one of power and violence. That’s what got him into his current situation and it’s the only thing that will get him and his daughter out.
As he and Polly run into one precarious situation after another, it becomes obvious that they have no one to rely on but each other. The reach of the Steel is long and outrunning the white supremacists is not an option. To that extent, She Rides Shotgun is at its best in the scenes where Nate and Polly are trying to connect and forge some sort of relationship. The script is lean on exposition, so all we really know is that Nate and Polly are closer to strangers than anything resembling family. The writing doesn’t try to force a full redemptive arc or fast-track their development, so the progress Nate and Polly make feels earned. Anyone familiar with Egerton’s work won’t be surprised to know he pulls off the tough guy bits, but the moments where he shows the fear underneath the surface is where his performance stands out. He also handles the scenes with Seger well. He never condescends to her or Polly, so they feel like equals.
Nate may be the catalyst for the action, but this is Polly’s story through and through. That’s something the script (by Harper along with Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski and director Nick Rowland never loses sight of. They make Polly the focus of nearly every scene and Heger shines. When you read the novel it’s easy to let yourself buy into the premise of following an 11 year-old as she navigates a world of violence and vicious killers. Condensing the story down to movie form threatens to push Polly into precocious kid territory, which has nuked lesser films than this. Heger’s performance is really, really great. Centering a young girl in this world of hyperviolent men makes the film stand apart from similar fare, but it also works to heighten and crystallize the dangers of her world. It’s a simple shift that ups the stakes in a plausible way and enriches the film’s payoffs.
This is a movie about the worlds we’re born into, the ones we create for ourselves, and how the former becomes the latter. There’s a repeated line between Nate and Polly that becomes the film’s battle cry: “you gotta feel weak to get strong.” Seeing how that manifests for Nate and Polly brings into focus the film’s overarching theme of surviving in a cruel and indifferent world. Rowland and the writers find the right balance between delivering thrilling set pieces and not romanticizing the dangers of this world. Everything is what it is and you can either let it swallow you whole or you can figure out how you’re going to survive it because no one is going to do it for you.
She Rides Shotgun has the propulsive anything-can-happen energy of your friends picking you up on a Friday night with the intent to see where the night takes you. Of course, most of those nights don’t involve double homicides, being greenlit by a local kingpin, robberies, and being on the run with the pre-teen daughter you don’t really know at all. I can only speak for myself.
