WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Sweet Girl, now streaming on Netflix.
As much as Netflix's Sweet Girl pits the Cooper family against the Big Pharma system, BioPrime, there is indeed a more human, tangible and grounded enemy that Ray (Jason Momoa) and his daughter, Rachel (Isabela Merced), have to fight. This is the brooding, mysterious assassin known as Amos Santos -- a strong, silent type who kills brutally and mercilessly. However, as much as he's the best part of the movie, he's also the worst.
Rachel's story gets a bit too convoluted when it's revealed she's actually the one killing people to get to the BioPrime bosses. She seems to have dissociative identity disorder, imagining she's her dead dad when she's on her quest for revenge. However, this does make the rivalry with Amos pretty interesting because he's the person who killed a reporter trying to whistleblow and then gutted Ray on a train in the first act in a knife display that'd make the Winter Soldier proud.
And as Sweet Girl rolls on, seeing Amos even killing BioPrime figures proves there's a deeper conspiracy at hand. The way he's silencing loose ends makes it even more enjoyable, as he's an efficient murder machine and a veritable one-man army trekking across America. But it starts to fall apart when he gets to the Pittsburgh outskirts to take out Rachel.
Amos meets with "Ray" at a diner and seeing as it's really Rachel, he gives her some insight into his own tragic background. Oppressors came to his family farm when he was a kid, slaughtered his loved ones and took their land. He survived by hiding, later becoming a hitman and taking the murderers out in revenge. Now, he's a hired gun, with Congresswoman Diana Morgan hiring him to snuff everyone out so her accepting bribes to help BioPrime will be kept discrete.
As much as Sweet Girl tries to make this nuanced and relatable, it fails miserably because Amos is then reduced to someone hunting Rachel for cheap thrills and a challenge. His history should deter him from being an obstacle in Rachel's way, as she's literally going through the same suffering he endured. After all, Rachel's mom died due to capitalists playing god with cancer drugs and market prices, blocking her from getting treatment. This means he's watching revenge, grief and PSTD consume and turn her into a monster like he was.
Thus, Amos should want to help Rachel fight the same opportunistic philosophies that deprived him of a happy life. Instead, by subliminally telling her to meet him in the city for a deathmatch, which if she survives will grant her access to Diana, Sweet Girl works counterintuitive to his past. It makes no sense to force an emotional link with Amos seeing himself in Rachel, then totally ignore the meaning behind it.
Had Amos flipped on Diana and helped Rachel, it'd have painted him as a man with a new purpose and given him redemption. He could have been her new father figure but instead, he's made into a cheap, predictable and uninspiring gimmick when the setup was there to fashion Amos into something so much more.
To see Amos be both the best and the worst, watch Sweet Girl now on Netflix.
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