“Eenie Meanie” wants to be a gritty crime drama, a character-driven redemption tale, and a quirky dark comedy all at once—but it never figures out how to balance any of those ambitions. The result is a film that lurches from tone to tone like a car stuck in the wrong gear.
Edie (Samara Weaving) is a reformed teenage getaway driver who’s desperately trying to leave her past behind. Just as she begins to imagine a stable life—complicated by the revelation that she’s pregnant—she’s pulled back into her old world. Nico (Andy Garcia), a former employer with slippery motives, offers her a deal: return to the life she swore off to save her chronically unreliable ex-boyfriend John (Karl Glusman). The stakes sound juicy on paper, but in execution, they’re anything but.
The film opens with young Edie, raised by degenerate parents played by Steve Zahn and Chelsea Crisp. These early sequences have an organic grit that almost promises a layered character study. But once the story jumps to the present day, things skid off the road. What follows is a patchwork of ideas—a chase movie here, a rom-com beat there, and an attempted meditation on motherhood wedged in the middle. Instead of blending genres, Eenie Meanie juggles them sloppily until everything crashes.
Weaving tries her best, giving Edie a rough-edged vulnerability that deserves a sharper vehicle. Garcia brings veteran gravitas, and Glusman leans into John’s unreliability with commitment. Marshawn Lynch, surprisingly good as Perm Walters—a former associate of Edie turned rival—brings unexpected menace laced with dry humor. It’s one of the film’s brighter spots, showing what could have been if the narrative focus had been tighter. Cameos from Randall Park and Dean Winters are always welcome, adding flashes of charm, but they’re brief distractions rather than structural support.
Writer-director Shawn Simmons, coming off his television background, doesn’t pivot to features with much confidence. Scenes are staged like TV episodes strung together, with pacing that feels both too brisk and too padded. There are moments of wit, and occasionally the dialogue pops, but the whole effort lacks cohesion.
By the final act, Eenie Meanie has tried on so many hats that it wears none convincingly. What could have been a sleek character-driven crime story ends up as tonal chaos.
Grade: C-
“Eenie Meanie” is available to stream on Hulu today.
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