She Rides Shotgun was better than expected but ultimately unsatisfying.
Polly is approached after school by a seeming stranger, who is her biological father, and recently released inmate, Nate. Nate wants to protect her from the gang that has already killed Polly’s mother and step-father, and that is searching for them, by taking her to Mexico. Detective John Park, whom Polly called the news hotline from the hotel where they were hiding, promises to care for her if Nate doesn’t survive his confrontation from the gang leader, whom Nate and John both want.
This crime-thriller emotional center is clearly the father-daughter relationship. Nate, who has been mostly absent, has returned to protect her, and they have a couple of days to learn about each other. Nate in his role as father teaches Polly to bash knees and brains with an aluminum bat for example and also remembers to grab Polly’s candy bar while robbing a gas station to finance their escape.
This movie has a 91% positive rating from top critics. Several cite the performances of Taron Egerton as Nate and Ana Sophia Heger as Polly. For instance, the NPR critic describes Egerton as “ripped and terrifying” and Heger as “flat-out terrific.”
Heger’s performance as Polly while impressive for a kid offers little insight into her motivation. Polly can escape a detective’s squad car, evade armed federal, state, and local officers, avoid any stray bullets, fool and outrun an agitated dog, and cut down her father, who is someone she barely knows, and someone who is shown her more mayhem and murder than most will ever witness.
Edgerton’s as Nick might be more plausible — a parent could care about preventing his actions from harming his child even if he abandoned her — but still is insufficient. He must vacillate between hardened criminal and loving parent, but the emotional distances as a result of the plot demands are too much for specific scenes and the entire story.
This movie succumbs to the crime thriller cinematic allure, and repeatedly returns the focus from this relationship to the chase. It might intend to challenge these conventions, or at least humanize this genre, which is intriguing but never realized in this adaptation.
I decided after listening to an actor interview to see The Life of Chuck but left the movie theater frustrated and confused.
This movie uses reverse chronology to tell Chuck’s life story from losing his parents and unborn sister in a car crash as a young boy and later his grandparents who raised him to his death from a brain tumor before his fortieth birthday. Between these events, he learns to dance first with his grandmother in her kitchen and later in middle school in an after-school club, follows his grandfather’s advice and becomes an accountant, and recalls just before his diagnosis his love of dance, a recollection he later shares in the hospital with his wife as the tumor consumes more and more of his consciousness and ultimately his life.
I generally agree with other reviewers about the gimmicky structure, the unrealized dread, and the clichéd plot. To these, I would add the central theme seems forced, which makes it ultimately unsatisfying.
This problem begins with the title, which misrepresents the focus of this film. This movie is less about Chuck and more about how humans should live as its structure suggests.
The first act, which is the conclusion of Chuck’s life, suggests the end of the world. No one seems to know why it is ending. The second act, in which Chuck remembers his dancing passion, consists of a series of interactions while he is attending an accounting conference first with a street-corner drummer and later a jilted young woman. These three spend several hours performing and later reveling in, and reflecting upon, their spontaneous intimacy.
The final act, which spans Chuck’s childhood, features a debate about how to live, and what his experiences suggest. Here is when Chuck’s grandfather Albie offers an argument that ultimately conditions so much of Chuck’s life.
Chuck has already been recognized by his peers and the after-school club teacher as the best male dancer and has agreed to dance with the best female dancer at the upcoming school event. Dance not only allows him to be seen and to connect at school but also connects him to his late grandmother, who would dance with him in her kitchen while she cooked.
Albie urges Chuck instead to follow his lead, and to have a life of numbers, which according to his grandfather is one of greater honesty and also with artistry. Numbers don’t lie, Albie insists, and yet can be creatively used, which his how he saved others’ businesses and livelihoods.
The second act — the accountant who remembers his lost artistic self — had already framed this debate as a predictable head-heart conflict. The performances suggest the characters’ infectious joy, yet the setting and the scenario do little to offset its predictability.
The problem is that it also establishes that Chuck has followed his grandfather’s advice, and that he later in this encounter with the street-corner drummer and the jilted woman, found something missing in his life, something he had lost or hadn’t maintained. His life in other words has been one of objectivity, and predictability, and one without passion or imagination, which is difficult to reconcile with his grandfather’s claim about the superiority of numbers.
This problem is exacerbated by the realization that the end times from the first part is in fact the end of Chuck’s world, or the subjective, imaginative one he has constructed. Chuck as a child has been told that he is varied and vast — that he contains Whitman’s “multitudes” — but seems to have forgotten at least until that fateful accounting conference day when he meets the drummer and the lover. Or maybe he hasn’t as he has been repeatedly thanked for thirty-nine years, which is obviously the length of his life.
Albie in other words has claimed that numbers don’t life and can be artfully deployed. That suggests that life as an accountant would be the best of both worlds, and a more reliable one for Chuck Albie adds than a world of dance where earning an income is difficult if not impossible. This more reliable life however has been dissatisfying or at least incomplete, Chuck has realized just before his life with the terminal diagnosis begins its end.
Neither Albie nor Chuck though can address, not then and not ever, the visions Albie sees in the cupola of his house, which only adds to the inconsistencies and incompleteness. Can Albie foresee the future because his numerical facility enables him to create or at least challenge it or because the cupola, which he claims is haunted, gives him glimpses of it?
Does Chuck regret his accounting choice? He seems in following his grandfather’s advice to have lost something. Nothing from his nearly four decades has enabled him to add, or at least retain, artistic aspects, or at least enough to prevent him from longing for his past, which includes his finger-waving grandmother who listens to rock and teaches him to dance while pursuing her own cooking passion.
The movie appears to reject Albie’s, and Chuck’s, choice in the way the world dies as Chuck does. At the same time, it insists near its end that Albie was right, or at least that Albie did use numbers, which don’t lie, in ways that enabled his clients, such as the funeral home family that handles his wake and burial for Chuck, to retain their businesses.
Maybe the movie means to suggest that life is a mystery. Chuck’s wife after all seems not to object to his marriage-long lie about the scar on his hand, which is a regular reminder to him that he reveled in his middle school suggest alone under the stars. Chuck is, as his wife acknowledges, a person of secrets.
If so, this secret could be one this movie is keeping from itself. It aspires to a great truth, something about the reconciliation of numbers and images or scientific confirmation and artistic imagination, and in so doing comment on a larger and longer cultural conversation. However, its inconsistencies and oversimplification — the head-heart binary for example — inhibit its efforts to arrive at any insights about math and art or objectivity and subjectivity or intellect and emotion.
Some certainly have been moved. One I observed was sobbing as the house lights reappeared, which was a reassuring reminder. I just couldn’t find any satisfaction in it for me.
Sarah Wynn-Williams’s (2025) book Careless People is offered as a memoir of her six years at Meta (Facebook), but it focuses as much on the people whose decisions created this company, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, who was reportedly hired to appease the Trump administration.
Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat, wanted to work for Facebook she explains because she believed in its potential and its power. She also recognized that this company needed a global perspective to maximize this potential for positive impact, and was eventually offered a position, which she developed in a way that allowed her to become central to its global policies.
This focus as much as anything explains the emergency injunction won by Meta to prevent Wynn-Williams from promoting her book although that according to some only increased its sales. If so, this response obviously backfired, but that likely means more money for Wynn-Williams but does not increase the likelihood of the public benefits she once identified.
Wynn-Williams generally knows how to tell engaging stories. Some moments are uneven, but many are engaging. I consistently wondered what happened next, and what some of these powerful yet peculiar people would say or do.
She also if this account is accurate has admirable attributes, such as confidence, motivation, and resilience. These seem even more so in contrast with her shortcomings that she details, such as the time she stopped in the middle of labor with her feet in the stirrups to draft a requested talking points memo, and insisted despite her husband’s and doctor’s requests upon sending it before returning to the task at hand.
This and other moments might make some question Wynn-Williams’s judgment. Perhaps most alarming was her willingness to stay in her position despite the political, social, and individual harm, such as blatant sexual harassment, that she witnessed and even experienced. These decisions some could suggest might have condoned such conditions no matter how often she cited the need of her family for health care or any increased capacity to change the company as a company insider.
Wynn-Williams’s relationship with Meta ends when she is fired. She insists that she had wanted to leave and had been searching for another job, but some might wonder whether she would have ever left on her own volition. Such critics could cite her decision to relocate reportedly at Zuckerberg’s request, which as she admits affects not just her but also her family, or her concerns about the economic consequences if she did.
Wynn-Williams also offers what could be considered a cautionary tale for those who might still be techno-optimists. She isn’t wrong to imagine the potential power in social media and other digital technologies. At the same time, she depicts the risks of being naive about surveillance capitalism, and especially its ability to disable this potential and exploit users.
That perhaps is a bigger problem. Despite her engaging stories, she hasn’t provided a narrative. Many moments are engaging although according to some contain little new information, but these together are never quite connected into a sequence of events that ultimately offers useful insight about not just this author but also if readers are lucky the times or world in which we live.
This flaw can be found even in its title, which refers to Tom and Daisy and their relationship in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1925) canonical The Great Gatsby. In it, Tom and Daisy are indeed careless, and even entitled, but Mark, Sheryl, and Joel in contrast seem more than careless, and rather self-absorbed, exploitative, and even ruthless in this book.
A question I have after reading it is whether Wynn-Williams could be considered part of this problem.
