Review: Even Jason Momoa isn’t strong enough to carry muddled ‘Sweet Girl’

Revenge thrillers don’t need to be realistic, but they do need to follow the logic of their own world building. “Sweet Girl,” a mash-up of those two subgenres that stars Jason Momoa as a grieving husband who issues a death threat against pharmaceutical company higher-ups after his wife dies, frustrates both with murkiness in its conception of the individuals responsible for the vast inequity in the American health care system and with its convoluted message about how to fight back. Ray, wife Amanda, and daughter Rachel are an active, loving family who go camping, scale rock formations and sing Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” to each other. Momoa’s public image of “big dude with a big heart” works to his advantage in “Sweet Girl,” and the lack of artifice in his performance conveys two extremes: the impenetrable anguish he’s carrying after the death of his wife and the certainty with which he targets Keeley and his associates. “Sweet Girl” can’t decide if it’s a story about revenge or rebirth, and a frankly flabbergasting perspective shift midway through careens the film too far off-course.