Is Anyone More Quietly Reliable These Days than Taron Egerton

From the moment Taron Egerton — hidden behind a face tattoo and a lifetime of bad decisions — appears outside a little girl’s school to collect her after her mother fails to show, She Rides Shotgun telegraphs its trajectory. Not in a lazy way, and not merely because the story comes preloaded from Jordan Harper’s excellent novel, but because She Rides Shotgun operates with the clarity of a classic crime tale. Its path is visible almost immediately; its pleasures come from how confidently it travels it. Sometimes there’s real satisfaction in watching a thriller unfold with precision — good actors doing great work inside a character-driven framework, directed with competence by Nick Rowland.

That’s exactly what happens here. You sense the ending from the moment Polly climbs into the car with her father, Nate (Egerton), an ex-con whose guilt seems dubious simply because of how Egerton plays him — damaged, wary, but decent. The film wastes no time establishing the stakes: Polly’s mother and her boyfriend have been murdered by the same Aryan gang targeting Nate for something he pulled inside prison. There’s a price on both their heads, the gang has the cops on its payroll, and the only person capable of helping them is the one officer (Rob Yang) who isn’t corrupt. The premise is simple: father and daughter must stay alive long enough to outrun the world closing in on them.

But the simplicity of the setup belies its richness. Once Polly pushes through her fear of the stranger who happens to be her father, the film settles into a tense, tender, fugitive-road-story rhythm. Along the way, they cross paths with a rotating cast of friends and criminals, including the gang’s leader, Houser — played by John Carroll Lynch whose typical gentleness is made grotesque by a handlebar mustache. The encounters are difficult, with each one sharpening the bond forming between a man who’s spent his life running from responsibility and a child who’s learning, moment by moment, how to trust him.

What makes She Rides Shotgun such a good movie is that it’s anchored by two remarkable performances. Egerton brings a weary vulnerability to Nate in yet another quietly stellar role from the actor who has hasn’t really missed since Rocketman (see also Black Bird, Smoke, Tetris, and even the better than it had any right to be Carry On). Meanwhile, Ana Sophia Heger is a revelation as Polly — she’s got that young Natalie Portman/McKenna Grace/Elle Fanning quality about her. Their dynamic gives the film its emotional charge, and Rowland lets the performances breathe inside a stripped-down, old-school, mid-budget thriller made for adults — a category Hollywood seems to have mostly forgotten how to produce.

Tonally, it evokes Hell or High Water mixed with the The Professional and Blue Ruin. The screenplay by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski (adapting from Harpr’s novel) is lean and unsentimental. The action is solid, the stakes are high, and the film never tries to outsmart its genre. Instead, it embraces the noir tradition: spare, tense, morally shadowed, and driven by the slow burn of two people learning to trust each other while the world bears down on them.

It’s not a twisty thriller, and it doesn’t want to be. It’s a tight, confident, emotionally grounded crime story that trusts its characters, its performers, and the sturdy machinery of the genre. She Rides Shotgun isn’t reinventing anything, but it reminds you just how satisfying a well-crafted noir can be.

‘She Rides Shotgun’ is available to rent on all the usual digital platforms, and it’s also streaming on MGM+.