SHE RIDES SHOTGUN

There's real craft here, and real tenderness. Taron Egerton and young Ana Sophia Heger build a father-daughter bond worth caring about, and the film's centerpiece car chase is genuinely thrilling. A good cop fighting corrupt ones gives the story a moral spine. None of that is nothing.

But the cost is steep. Nearly 70 obscenities — almost 50 of them "f" words, two spoken by the 11-year-old herself — plus profanities using Christ's name pile up alongside graphic gunfights and a bloody stabbing. And the ending doesn't offer the girl, or the audience, any real light. The darkness she's dragged through is never fully overcome.

That combination — heavy content wedded to a story that refuses to redeem its own suffering — is exactly what Movieguide's standards exist to flag. A better film was possible from this same material. This isn't it. Skip it, and spend the evening on something that treats a child's trauma as more than a mood.

Nate, a low-level criminal fresh out of prison, shows up to pick his 11-year-old daughter Polly up from school — a girl who hasn't seen him in years and barely recognizes him. Nate has just broken from the racist prison gang that once protected him, a betrayal that got its leader killed and put a bounty on Nate, his ex-wife, and Polly herself. With assassins hunting them and police wrongly convinced Nate is a murderer, father and daughter have nowhere to go but toward each other. That's the setup.

Three stars means this is genuinely good filmmaking wrapped around a story that doesn't deserve it. Egerton and Heger carry real chemistry as father and daughter, John Carroll Lynch is reliably menacing as the villain, and Rob Yang gives the detective subplot some weight. The midpoint car chase is, by the source's own account, brilliantly staged and exciting.

Where it falters is the ending. The film surrenders to a noir fatalism that's been crime cinema's default mode since the 1940s, and that choice drains the emotional payoff the first two acts had earned. A story this attentive to a child's fear owed her — and us — more than despair as a final word.

There's real light struggling to get through here. Nate's love for Polly is sacrificial and costly, and the film gives us a genuinely good cop willing to risk everything to bring down a corrupt, gang-infested sheriff's department — a small but real picture of integrity under pressure. The film even puts its characters inside a roadside chapel for truckers, cross outside and in, prayer painted on its walls.

But the film backs away from what it stages. Sheltered inside that very chapel, father and daughter confess to each other that neither believes in anything — Polly recalls once claiming to be Jewish at school, then visiting a synagogue and simply not liking it. Faith is presented as furniture in this world, not truth. And the story's ending refuses Polly any real comfort; the darkness she's lived through is not overcome, only survived.

That's the film's central failure and its central longing at once. It knows the world is dark. It just won't say where the light comes from. Scripture answers plainly: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" (John 1:5). A story this honest about darkness deserved that answer.

There's a good film buried in here — a father earning back his daughter's trust, a car chase worth the price of admission, actors giving this material more than it asked for. But the film wraps that goodness in nearly seventy obscenities and hands an 11-year-old an ending with no real light in it. Our answer stands: skip it. For a family movie night, start with our latest instead.