‘She Rides Shotgun’ Review: A Coming-of-Age Story Disguised as a Brutal Chase Thriller

There is a type of film that Americans have traditionally made better than almost anyone else: stories built around troubled, morally ambiguous characters with complicated pasts who try—often in dubious ways—to redeem themselves. In the hands of filmmakers without a long tradition to lean on, crime thrillers like She Rides Shotgun might easily become empty exercises in style, filled with clichés and predictable situations. What Nick Rowland achieves here, however, is telling “a story we’ve all heard before” but adding enough distinctive touches—both stylistic and emotional—to give the film energy, tension, and genuine feeling.

It’s not a plot that holds up well under a microscope. There are narrative holes, or at least some difficult-to-explain gaps. But Rowland (Calm With Horses) doesn’t appear especially worried about strict realism. Instead, he leans into the classic conventions of the genre to tell a story that, beneath the disguise of a violent crime thriller, is essentially a coming-of-age tale—one of the bloodiest imaginable. Through what at first appears to be a cross-state fugitive escape, what the director is truly interested in is the fractured relationship between a father and his daughter, a bond broken by years of absence and regret.

Based on the novel by Jordan Harper, the film begins with what looks like a kidnapping. Polly (the extraordinary Ana Sophia Heger), an eleven-year-old girl, waits at school for her mother to pick her up. Minutes pass. Instead of her mother, her father Nate (Taron Egerton) shows up—a tough-looking man she clearly hasn’t seen in years. When Polly and the audience realize that the car she’s being ushered into is stolen, we fear the worst. And while some of those fears are justified, they’re not justified in the way one might expect.

Something has happened at her mother’s home, though Nate refuses to discuss it. Instead, he drives off with Polly and tells her they need to escape. Soon we learn that Nate is being hunted by a white-supremacist prison gang similar to the Aryan Brotherhood—men he crossed while serving time and who now want him and his loved ones dead. Whether Nate is telling the complete truth is immediately questionable, especially to a terrified young girl who has no idea what’s happening.

Meanwhile, a determined cop named John Park (Rob Yang) is on their trail, and his investigation suggests a connection to a notorious neo-Nazi group known as the Steels. His colleagues warn him not to dig deeper—an ominous sign that Nate has become a problem best erased, with Polly as potential collateral damage.

From there, She Rides Shotgun follows Polly and Nate as they flee from various threats, both external and those they stumble into through bad luck or bad decisions. But the heart of the film lies in the gradual rebuilding of a relationship that barely existed. As the two wade deeper into violence and danger—situations no child should ever experience, let alone take part in—Polly becomes resourceful, practical, and sometimes the only reason Nate survives.

Around the halfway point, the story takes a somewhat forced and arguably arbitrary turn, pushing the film closer to a traditional action picture. When Rowland loses sight of the central father-daughter core, the movie becomes more conventional, even if one of its key villains—played with terrifying force by the great character actor John Carroll Lynch—remains magnetic. In these sections, it becomes especially clear that the movie needs Polly at its center for the story to work. When she reenters the spotlight, everything snaps back into focus.

Except for the moments in which Rowland seems intent on delivering crowd-pleasing set pieces—handled, to be fair, with considerable skill—She Rides Shotgun is a powerful story about a girl dropped into an unimaginably violent situation who must rely on her own intelligence, determination, and the guidance of a father who is learning to be one under the worst possible circumstances. Rowland directs with restraint and elegance, serving the story more than his own ego, while still allowing for surprising and inventive staging choices.

Echoes of Clint Eastwood’s cinema—particularly A Perfect World, which shares notable thematic parallels—run throughout a film that builds on the strength of the crime-movie tradition to tell a survival story about the sudden, brutal leap from childhood into adulthood, skipping everything that should take place in between.