SHE RIDES SHOTGUN

Name: SHE RIDES SHOTGUN
Item: SHE RIDES SHOTGUN
Author: Review

"Darkness Not Fully Overcome"

Family Content: -3 Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies.)

Entertainment Quality:

	None	Light	Moderate	Heavy
Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

Credits →

What You Need To Know:

SHE RIDES SHOTGUN is a thriller based on an award-winning novel by Jordan Harper, a crime writer who’s worked on acclaimed TV crime series, including THE MENTALIST and GOTHAM. Taron Egerton plays Nate, a petty criminal who tries to protect his estranged 11-year-old daughter from a racist Neo-Nazi gang. Nate left the gang but had to kill its leader. So, the gang put out a hit on Nate’s ex-wife and 11-year-old daughter, Polly. Sadly, the gang has already killed the wife and her second husband. So, Nate absconds with Polly to help her evade the gang’s assassins. Making matters worse, the police think Nate murdered his ex-wife.

SHE RIDES SHOTGUN has a positive father and daughter story, despite the violent circumstances the two characters find themselves facing. It has suspenseful and touching moments, plus some excellent acting. However, the movie’s ending is not entirely positive and thus a bit depressing. SHE RIDES SHOTGUN also has lots of intense violence, including two graphic gunfights and a graphic stabbing. Finally, the movie is heavily marred by many strong obscenities and a few strong profanities.

Content:

(B, C, HH, Ab, PP, Ab LLL, VVV, A, DD, MM):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Light moral worldview where a petty criminal tries to protect his daughter from a Neo-Nazi gang trying to kill them, with some light Christian content (the father and daughter hole out in a Christian chapel for truckers standing by the roadside and sporting a cross outside and inside, and the chapel has a prayer to God on the sides), but the father and daughter while hiding inside the trailer church confess to each other they don’t have a religion (the daughter says she once said she was Jewish in school, and her mother took her to a Jewish Temple service but she didn’t like it, and there’s a good cop who helps the father and daughter and leads the efforts to bring down the vicious drug gang of Neo-Nazis, but there are corrupt cops who are part of the gang, and a cop who’s too scared to oppose them and so he takes their bribe money;

Foul Language:

At least 68 obscenities (including at least 48 “f” words, two said by 11-year-old character), one profanity using the name of Jesus Christ, and three GD profanities;

Violence:

Some very strong violence includes a man’s stomach is cut open to get the drugs he swallowed to smuggle, a large gunfight results in some bullets hitting bodies and heads with blood spray following, there’s a strong but exciting car chase scene with a crash where one car gets its rear window shot out, father fights a gang member who’s trying to turn him and his daughter over to the evil gang, father holds a shotgun on a clerk to steal money from a convenience store selling gas, and father has a gunfight with a store customer and gets shot in the leg (the fight endangers the daughter, and she’s screaming while hiding from the flying bullets);

Sex:

No sex;

Nudity:

No nudity;

Alcohol Use:

Brief alcohol use;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking, but the villains are smuggling drugs and selling them; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

Stealing, robbery, corruption, betrayal.

More Detail:

SHE RIDES SHOTGUN is a thriller about a petty criminal who tries to protect his estranged young daughter after he leaves the vicious Neo-Nazi gang he joined and kills the gang’s leader, which results in the gang killing the girl’s mother and marking the girl for death in retaliation. Based on an award-winning novel by Jordan Harper, SHE RIDES SHOTGUN has suspenseful and touching moments where the father and daughter bond while evading the gang, including corrupt police, but the ending is too depressing, and the movie has intense situations, some graphic violence and lots of crude, gratuitous foul language.

The movie starts with 11-year-old Polly being surprised when her estranged father, Nate, picks her up after school instead of her mother. Polly hasn’t seen Nate for several years because he went to prison. Meanwhile, her mother has divorced and remarried. So, she’s surprised Nate is out of jail.

SHE RIDES SHOTGUN doesn’t reveal the details of how Nate got out of prison and how he ended up coming to pick up Polly. However, Polly learns (and the moviegoer too) that her father tried to leave the racist Neo-Nazi gang he joined, who helped him survive in prison. The gang, which calls itself Aryan Steel, doesn’t allow such disloyalty, though, and somehow Nate ended up killing the gang’s founder and leader. So, the gang put out a hit not only on Nate, but also on his ex-wife and Polly.

Then, when Nate tried to visit his ex-wife to warn her, he found out she and her husband had already been killed. So, now he’s not only trying to hide and protect Polly, he’s also running from the police, who think Nate murdered his ex-wife. Sadly, Polly finds out about her mother’s murder from watching the TV news one morning in a motel room while Nate is still asleep.

A detective handling Nate’s case sees a way to use Nate to destroy the gang, which has been a thorn in law enforcement’s side for years. The gang not only runs drugs across New Mexico’s border with Mexico. One of its members is also a corrupt and brutal county sheriff in New Mexico, who’s enlisted all his deputies in the gang and its evil business.

Nate and Polly’s chances of surviving this mess seem awfully slim.

SHE RIDES SHOTGUN is based on a novel by crime author Jordan Harper, who’s also written and worked for TV’s popular detective series THE MENTALIST and GOTHAM, the great ABC series about the early career of Commissioner Jim Gordon of BATMAN comics. The movie builds to some fairly suspenseful and touching moments as Nate and Polly bond together as father and daughter while they try to evade both the Aryan gang and the police, who think Nate murdered his ex-wife and her second husband. It doesn’t help matters when Nate has to rob a convenience store to get enough money to escape to Mexico.

SHE RIDES SHOTGUN has a positive father and daughter story, despite the violent circumstances the two characters find themselves facing. The movie’s actors also do a good job, including Taron Egerton as the father and Ana Sophia Heger as the young daughter. Rob Yang does a good job as the detective who seems to be helping them. Also, John Carroll Lynch does his usual terrifying turn as the story’s brutal villain who stops at nothing.

However, the movie’s ending is not entirely positive and thus a bit depressing. It surrenders to the dark and pessimistic attitude and mood that too many crime stories have had since the advent of the Film Noir movement in 1940s Hollywood. Also, the father and daughter confess to one another they don’t believe in any religion, even though they find some refuge at one point in a small Christian chapel for truckers.

SHE RIDES SHOTGUN also has lots of intense violence, including a graphic gunfight and a bloody stabbing. A car chase in the middle of the movie, however, is brilliantly done, and very exciting. Finally, the movie is heavily marred by many strong obscenities and a few strong profanities, including more than 65 “f” words.

Overall, therefore, SHE RIDES SHOTGUN is excessive and unacceptable according to the biblical standards MOVIEGUIDE® and its staff applies to entertainment. The darkness that little Polly encounters in SHE RIDES SHOTGUN is not fully overcome, and the movie’s ending strongly suggests she will remain haunted by it. The ending would have been more powerful dramatically if it suggested that there’s also a ray of light still available to her. This easily could have been done without being unrealistic or saccharine about it.