She Rides Shotgun - Review 

Rating: 4 out of 5

ANA Sophia Hager is a child actress with a big future ahead of her. Think Natalie Portman (who broke out in Leon) or Hailee Steinfeld (of True Grit brilliance).

The young actress plays an 11-year-old girl who is forced to go on the run with her ex-convict dad (Taron Egerton) from corrupt cops and white supremacists in gritty indie thriller She Rides Shotgun.

And the performance she delivers is, at times, staggering - particularly as director Nick Rowland refuses to make easy choices in the direction the film takes: a decision that gives rise to a truly stunning final sequence that finds a deeply traumatised youngster attempting to take the first steps towards putting her shattered life back together.

Hager plays a girl named Polly, who is first seen at the very start of the movie awaiting her pick-up from school by her mum. Instead, it’s her dad, Nate, who arrives, clearly in a hurry and in a car she immediately notices has been hot wired.

The situation feels ominous, to say the least, despite Nate’s insistence that everything is fine.

A news report soon reveals that Polly’s mum and her stepfather have been found murdered, with Nate the prime suspect. But, after confronting her estranged father, a different reality emerges.

Having reached out for protection to an Aryan gang while in prison, Nate subsequently upset them and has been greenlit - along with all members of his family - for assassination. It is now down to him to protect his daughter - a task not made easy by the uneasy relationship that exists between them.

The dynamic between Hager and Egerton is sensational. It’s fractured, at best, yet slowly builds towards mutual trust and love. But it’s not at all sentimental. It feels raw, gritty and realistic.

Egerton - on a career roll with this and Smoke - is similarly impressive as Nate, full of anguish and regret over the direction life has taken him. He’s desperate, too, to be a good father and a protector.

As brutal and action packed as She Rides Shotgun is, the real strength of the movie lies in its central relationship and both Hager and Egerton effortlessly put you on their side, displaying a tenderness in certain moments that their predicament seldom allows. They are the movie’s beating heart - offering light in a lot of darkness.

That’s not to detract from the film’s ability to deliver on the action, either. Early on, it’s properly pulse-pounding with a car chase and a petrol station shootout two examples of the film’s ability to both grip and provide adrenaline surges.

Rowland brings the energy of early Danny Boyle to some of these sequences (not least in his use of a propulsive dance track underpinning the car chase), while also drawing on the no-nonsense grit of the ‘70s and even some grindhouse-style violence late on that would probably leave Tarantino impressed.

There’s solid support, too, from the likes of Rob Yang, as a cop who may provide the key to Nate’s salvation, and John Carroll Lynch as a ruthlessly corrupt cop (who takes a delight in torture).

If there’s a criticism , it’s that the film can’t quite maintain its momentum all the way through: the final act, in which Lynch’s villain really comes to the fore, is perhaps unnecessarily graphic and brutal, while the climactic shootout doesn’t entirely satisfy or make sense - despite another bravura, almost split-screen sequence that finds Polly racing along a desert path, while just below her all hell breaks loose with that shootout.

In spite of its lacy act wobble, She Rides Shotgun has so much to recommend it, from Rowland’s muscular (and sometimes audacious) direction, to Egerton’s reliably intense leading man. But it’s Hager who leaves the most lasting impression, that final shot providing the crowning achievement of an out and out tour-de-force.

Certificate: 15

Running time: 2hrs