Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Shawn Simmons
Starring: Samara Weaving, Karl Glusman, Jermaine Fowler, Marshawn Lynch, Randall Park, Steve Zahn, Andy Garcia
For all the action heroines Hollywood has given us in recent decades, it's still a surprise to see a woman behind the wheel for a high-octane car chase. Notable exceptions include Diana Rigg relegating James Bond to a passenger in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Linda Hamilton's upmarket car thief in Black Moon Rising, but such characters are rarities. Hollywood seems to believe audiences will accept five foot nothing women taking down hulking Russian henchmen, but parallel parking is a step too far.
Eenie Meanie, whose title might fool you into believing it to be an Elmore Leonard adaptation, puts a woman front and centre behind the wheel, but it's a car chase movie where the car chases amount to little more than five minutes of its total runtime. The disappointments begin early on, with an opening scene that teases a car chase with a 14-year-old girl trying to evade the cops that will arrest her drug addicted parents, but the movie cuts to credits just as soon as a pedal is put to the metal.
That wayward teenager is Edie, whom we meet 14 years later in the form of genre staple Samara Weaving. After spending much of her young adult life working as a getaway driver for mobster Nico (Andy Garcia), Edie is in the process of going straight, now working at a bank rather than aiding in robbing such establishments.
Edie is drawn back for one last job when her ex-boyfriend John (Karl Glusman), whose child she is now carrying, finds himself in debt to Nico. To save John, Edie agrees to be the getaway driver in a casino heist that will net Nico $3 million. Naturally, various unexpected obstacles ensure this doesn't go off as smoothly as planned.
Rather than an action movie, as the marketing and its premise might suggest, Eenie Meanie is a caper comedy in the vein of all those bad Tarantino knockoffs that stank out cinemas in the late '90s. There's very little action, and the climactic car chase stalls before it gets to fifth gear. Instead first-time writer/director Shawn Simmons leans into the comic dynamic between Weaving's straight woman and Glusman's comic foil. The two actors make for a good pairing and have a convincingly abrasive chemistry, but they're lumbered with an over-written script that forces them to constantly reel off what is supposed to be snappy dialogue, but which mostly lands with a thud. There are very few writers who can make this sort of dialogue sing - Shane Black is one, and occasionally Tarantino - and when it's misfiring as badly as Eenie Meanie it's especially cringey. There are a few genuine laughs here, but they come via visual gags rather than the self-satisfied dialogue. One shocking but hilarious moment wouldn't be out of place in a Final Destination movie.
The comic dialogue jars with a movie where a lot of dark shit happens onscreen. Characters are violently killed who really don't deserve such a fate, and the movie cruelly mocks their fate like a kid torturing a puppy. It's only in its final few minutes that the film acknowledges this, but by then it's too late and comes off as hypocritical, almost Haneke-esque in how it tries to make us feel bad for enjoying the cartoonish violence of the movie up to that point (except it's rarely enjoyable). There are also odd inconsistencies that suggest troubled rewrites. Edie's father (Steve Zahn) pops up in a scene that sets up a payoff that never actually transpires. The film is set in 2021, but it's a bizarre alternate reality where the pandemic never happened. The movie also can't decide if its main action is set 14 or 18 years after the prologue.
The biggest problem is that despite Glusman's comic charm, John is an unlikeable and unstable asshole, and no viewer in their right mind will be rooting for Weaving's Edie to hook up with such a douchebag. That Edie should settle for a man whose league she is well out of could almost be interpreted as an allegory for Weaving's career. Despite proving supremely watchable in even her worst movies, the big league roles continue to elude her, forcing her to settle for dross like Eenie Meanie.
Eenie Meanie is on Disney+ from August 22nd.
