This film has only been out for a bit over a month and I am not sure if it ever saw a theatrical release. This might be one of those films that is the modern-day equivalent of planned straight-to-DVD sort of film and when I was reading the synopsis I thought it looked like exactly that.
However, once I let the film go for a little bit I was pleasantly surprised with how good the performances were for most of the main characters and while the story meanders a bit and gets truly absurd at certain parts we can forgive it for most of these mistakes.
Perhaps the name Taron Egerton means something to some people out there but while I was watching this film he has a sort of look that made me think "hey, i've seen that guy somewhere before" and it turns out he is best known for being in The Kingsman films that I didn't really pay a great deal of attention to. I was thinking he looked like the oldest brother in Malcom in the Middle but I was wrong.
Anyway this movie is about an estranged father who went to prison for crimes he definitely did commit but now he is out and is frantically trying to get to and protect his daughter that he apparently hasn't had much of a relationship with in her life. She isn't afraid of him, just apprehensive, but this all changes quite a lot as the story unfolds.
At first, we, the audience are made to believe that Dad is kidnapping his daughter out of some sort of malicious intent but as the story progresses we are shown that it is about so much more than that.
I don't want to spoil it because it is a really major part of the overall plot.
While "Nathan" (Taron Egerton) is meant to be the main star in this, the show truly gets stolen by "Polly" who is brilliantly played by a newcomer so new she barely has an online presence, Ana Sophia Heger. This really means a lot coming from me because by default I tend to dislike child actors and there are very few exceptions to this rule of mine.
She doesn't overact or seem to not understand how a child would act in this position, but the film-writers did a very good job in writing her character. A lot of times when child actors end up sucking in films or TV shows it is because the writers imbue their character arc with a level of experience and level-headedness that no child would ever portray, but in this film "Polly" is actually very vulnerable and often confused, just like you would expect a young child would be in violent situations that they are completely unfamiliar with.
At no point in time do they try to turn Polly into a "girl boss" and that is a big part of the reason why I enjoyed this. Also, despite the fact that Nathan is pretty ripped and clearly has a violent past and can handle himself, they don't give him Jason Bourne type abilities. If he has to fight multiple people at a time he loses just like almost anyone else in the world would.
I feel like the writing of believable characters is absolutely essential to a good screenplay or script, so I gotta tip my hat to the three people that were involved in the creation of this one and one of them was the author of a book by the same name, Jordan Harper.
This isn't an action film, it isn't a drama, it also isn't necessarily a feel-good story but I will not reveal why that is.
The only things I kind of had a problem with in this film is some rather implausible situations where the police act very differently than they would in a real-life situation. That is a minor annoyance though and is reserved to mostly just a few minutes of the film. Other than that, I think that this is one of the better low-budget films I have seen this year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9OkHjOnQPg
Should I watch it?
I think my opinion should be clear at this point and the answer is "yes" I think you should see it. It is actually kind of rare that a film from the USA doesn't follow a particular sort of easy-to-predict script and we can't really get that from any of the big companies these days that seem to crank out carbon-copies of the same film with different actors over and over again.
I've been a bit vague about the story here on purpose, but I think that this is a solid 2-hour film that most people will enjoy. There might be a bit of a struggle with anyone who is not a native-English speaker because there is quite a lot of slang in this, but you can get past that with subtitles.
I expected to turn this off before it was over but I watched it all the way through and am quite pleased that I did so.
at the moment the only legal way to watch this is to rent or buy on Fandango. I see that it is also available on AppleTV+ but I don't know if that is included with a membership, or if you have to pay extra for it. While I did enjoy this film, if you wait a few months it will likely be available on many more streaming sites included with the monthly membership