‘Eenie Meanie’ Review: Samara Weaving Guns It in Hulu’s Above Average Elmore Leonard Riff

Everyone loves a great car chase movie. Heck, everyone loves a pretty good car chase movie. Even a car chase movie that’s merely above average has universal appeal. “Eenie Meanie,” the feature debut from writer/director Shawn Simmons (“Wayne”), is trying to be great. Often it’s good. Mostly it’s got universal appeal.

Samara Weaving, one of the great movie stars Hollywood hasn’t figured out how to turn into a star yet, plays Edith. She’s an ace getaway driver, ever since she was a teenager, but she’s trying to straighten up and fly right. She’s going to college. She works at a bank. The only problem is her ex-boyfriend John (Karl Glusman). He’s a drug addict with impulse control issues and he can’t stay out of trouble. Edith can relate: She’s addicted to John, and can’t resist the urge to run back to him. No matter how badly he ruins her life.

Just when Edith thought she was finally over him, a couple months after their last ill-advised fling, she finds out she’s pregnant. When she tries to tell John he’s getting tortured by gun-toting goons, so they abscond in a high-speed chase. It turns out John has, for the umpteenth time, done something extremely chaotic. Now he owes millions of dollars to their old crime boss, Nico (Andy Garcia), who’d seem like a pretty nice guy if he didn’t want to remove John’s skeleton from his body.

Then again, now that we know John, we can relate. John is a garbage fire in human skin. While nobody can fully decode the quantum mechanics of the human heart, for a lot of “Eenie Meanie” we have no idea what Edith sees in this jerk. He can’t even wait in a car for 30 minutes without ditching the easiest job in the world and starting a bar brawl. John’s actively ruining Edith’s life in countless ways. He’s not unattractive, fair enough, and there’s a puppy dog charm to his cluelessness, but we’re not talking about a guy who’s got potential and hasn’t applied himself yet. John gets people killed, all the time, on purpose and by accident, and he’s probably going to get Edith killed too if she lets him.

At some point Simmons seems to realize we have no idea what Edith sees in John, so he gives her a speech to explain what he means to her, and impressively, we finally get it. We understand why she’s loyal. We understand why she doesn’t want him dead. We just don’t understand why she wants him around.

“Eenie Meanie” is a relationship movie, a talky and quippy film about people who love each other but haven’t figured out that love doesn’t solve all problems. Sometimes love is the problem. Samara Weaving and Karl Glusman are believable as people who probably have good hearts, but haven’t figured out good ways to use them. They carry the emotional weight of Shawn Simmons’ film on their capable shoulders.

But it’s also a crime film, and it’s not a particularly memorable one. The only way to save John’s life is — naturally — to pull a big casino heist, and — naturally — it involves driving a muscle car through the building. The heist gets planned the way heists always get planned. The car chases, although there aren’t many of them, are nifty. The climactic chase includes a chaos element which, frankly, is so unconventional and exciting I’m surprised we haven’t seen it done before in a lot of other films. It hints that maybe, a few drafts down the line (or a few drafts back, if the development process got in the way) there was a version of “Eenie Meanie” that would have had a few more tricks up its sleeve.

Shawn Simmons’ screenplay strives, in every scene, to give every character snappy dialogue in the post-“Pulp Fiction” mold. But the chatter fades into a background quickly. It’s never quite smart enough or funny enough to elevate this material. What makes “Eenie Meanie” work, which it mostly does (to one degree of another), is its sincerity. When the heist runs into a roadblock, and Edith’s backup plan reveals they changed their life around and left the business, that’s not a moment for our hero to panic because she can’t solve a problem. It’s a moment for introspection because, wait a minute, why does nobody in Edith’s life love her enough to change too?

“Eenie Meanie” plays like a decent adaptation of an unpublished Elmore Leonard novel. Even the title looks like it should be on a spinner rack next to “Freaky Deaky” and “Rum Punch.” Shawn Simmons can’t quite nail that easygoing patois. His pages and pages of dialogue come across mannered and arch. But he’s got an amusing cast of characters to work with, and he’s thought them out with more psychological depth than a lot of similar crime films.

And while this car chase movie would have benefitted from more car chases, what we get is rousing and, dare I say it, “cool.” But it’s relatively easy to be cool. Anyone can give a movie glitz. The bandits in “Eenie Meanie” needed more than swag if they wanted to be truly out of sight.

The post ‘Eenie Meanie’ Review: Samara Weaving Guns It in Hulu’s Above Average Elmore Leonard Riff appeared first on TheWrap.