She Rides Shotgun ★★
- 2filmcritics
- Aug 14
- 4 min read
Availability: Still playing in some theaters nationally. No streaming at this time. Digital release expected as early as later this month (August 2025). Release on Starz projected for late December or early January. See JustWatch here for updated online rental and purchase options.
Kidsploitation
Just released from prison, Nate McCluskey is a marked man, slated for “greenlighting”—that is, assassination by the Aryan Brotherhood, which he has double-crossed to get out of jail. He picks up from school his 11-year-old daughter Polly, knowing she too has been greenlighted because of his actions. What follows is a version of a father-daughter road trip, one in which Polly is educated in the techniques of evading the bad guys and the cops, quickly forgetting about her dead mother and stepfather.
Daddy (Taron Egerton) and his daughter Polly (Ana Sophia Heger)
share tender moments.
Taron Egerton, a Welsh actor known mostly in the UK and for TV roles, is perfectly cast as the balding, tattooed, clever-but-not-too-smart ex-con. Good at fending off potential killers, he is short on long-term planning: “I’ve always just put one foot in front of the other.” Ana Sophia Heger, only 10 during the filming, also is credible as the wide-eyed, innocent Polly. And Egerton and Heger are good together, believable as parent and child forging a bond that hasn’t existed because Daddy has been put away for most of his daughter’s childhood.
Egerton and Heger are good together, believable as parent and child forging a bond.
This bond includes tender moments, to be sure. It’s also forged in the capers of those on the lam: holding up a gas station minimart at gunpoint, killing a bad guy who seems to be a cop, careening along a busy divided highway in the wrong direction, heading off-road and in and out of ditches to avoid the fast-pursuing police car, lights flashing, sirens blaring. “Put on your seatbelt!” hardly seems an adequate means to protect your daughter as you smash your vehicle into cars and barricades.
The plot, based on Jordan Harper’s award-winning eponymous debut novel, pairs family bonds and loss of innocence with the surfeit of blood and gore de rigueur in cinema these days. A well-meaning detective investigating on his own (the never-smiling Ron Yang) and a corrupt New Mexico sheriff (John Carroll Lynch, hardly recognizable as the road-side philosopher from “Sorry, Baby,” 2 Film Critics’ last review) are the only other characters of note in UK director and co-writer Nick Rowland’s script. The corrupt sheriff in his meth-cooking apron (or is it to protect himself from the splattered blood of his tortured victims?) adds a “Breaking Bad” ambience, or as someone noted, this film makes TV’s “Breaking Bad” look like family fare.
Polly (Heger) may not be holding the gun in this scene, but she's there for all the mayhem, here with her Dad (Egerton) in the open spaces of New Mexico.
Besides teaching his daughter to fasten her seatbelt, Daddy tutors tiny Polly in how to defend herself by hitting the bad guy with a pipe iron in the knees and behind the head. Daddy also teaches Polly the joy of escaping the cops, of winning the chase. They high-five their success.
Instead of 1970s Blaxploitation, are we now in the era of Kidsploitation?
Those lessons in harming people, cop-killing (okay, the cop’s a bad guy), armed robbery, and the blood and gore from which at some point even Polly must avert her eyes, all give one pause: Is the film a touching, contemporary father-daughter story, or an exercise in exploitation? Instead of 1970s Blaxploitation, are we now in the era of Kidsploitation?
The bad guys of course are scary dudes,
to adults not to mention 11-year-olds.
The actor Adam Honeyfield
doesn't have a character name,
nor is he mentioned in the cast list.
On the scene for pure fright-effects.
In 1967’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” we learned to root for the anti-heroes, and to wince as they died in a bath of gunfire and blood. But we’re talking children here. Is Nate a good Dad doing his best to protect his daughter? Might what occurred have happened in real life? Yes, and yes. And yet “She Rides Shotgun”—from its name (derived from the Wild West practice of an armed guard seated next to a stagecoach driver) to its climax—seems more exploitative than exciting and adventurous. Closer to child abuse than to a lesson in agency and resilience. When Polly chooses a Snickers over a Mars bar as her reward from the forthcoming armed robbery, it appears that even director and writer Rowland understands the absurdity of the idea that Polly is somehow choosing to participate. The finale is at best preposterous.
Loss of innocence using younger and younger children is a cottage industry, with the innocents taken along on post-apocalyptic escapades, whether it’s TV’s “The Last of Us” (cue the zombies) or 2009’s “The Road” (cue the cannibals). Films and novels involve the observer in the traumas of childhood; in “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008) or “Room” (2015) the narratives appear to have a basis in reality as well as some larger purpose. The joy and criminal techniques Polly learns seem gratuitously opportunistic, made for shock value and melodramatic effect. In spite of apt casting and excellent performances from the 2 leads, one has to reflect on “She Rides Shotgun” with a feeling of sadness that this is what constitutes entertainment today.
She says: Maybe I’m a typical viewer. I was impressed by the acting, and only after badgering by my fellow film critic and rethinking the film did I come to agree with the conclusion that the film is immoral.
He says: Unlike the John Wayne/Kim Darby version of “True Grit” (1969), one would never describe “She Rides Shotgun” as a “fine family film.”
Date: 2025
Director: Nick Rowland
Starring: Taron Egerton, Ana Sophia Heger, Rob Yang, John Carroll Lynch
Runtime: 120 minutes
Country: United States
Language: English
Other Awards: None to date