Some films arrive with a swagger that suggests they know exactly what they want to be. Then they take a few steps, glance over their shoulder at their idols, and lose the plot. The Hulu exclusive film called Eenie Meanie walks into that trap. It wants the slick bravado and needle drop energy of a Tarantino joint, with some of the zippy rhythm that made Baby Driver such a rush. You can feel the filmmaker’s affection for that kind of cinema in every scene. The trouble is that affection is not the same thing as identity. An echo can be loud, but it is still an echo.
What you get is a crime thriller that keeps telling you it is cool while you are watching the cool slip through its fingers. The dialogue is packed with clever lines and sudden bursts of shouting. The shots are composed like someone who studied their favorite films one frame at a time. There is blood and panic and a big score to chase. On paper that sounds like a good time. In practice the movie falls into a familiar hole. The people on screen feel like they were written to sound like the writer. The danger never quite makes your pulse lift. The story moves, but you rarely care where it is going or who makes it to the end.
At the center of it all is Samara Weaving. She has a knack for stealing scenes, even when the material around her is wobbling. Here she plays Edie Meaney, a small time crook with a sharp gaze and a lot of mileage on her soul. A gangster named Nico, played by Andy Garcia, once gave her the nickname Eenie Meanie. It sticks. Edie has the frame of a scrapper who can take a punch and keep her jaw set. You believe she has been around crime long enough to read a room in two seconds. Weaving can do guarded and dangerous and funny, sometimes inside the same breath. The movie needs that. But even she looks tired of dragging this thing up the hill.
The story opens with a messy reunion. Edie shows up to see John, played by Karl Glusman, to deliver news she did not expect to have to say out loud. She is nearly through her first trimester. He is the father. It has been weeks since they spoke. You can sense she has already decided she is not going to beg him to step up. Then she walks into a scene that should probably send her back out the door. He is naked. There is a firearm pointed at him. He is very much in the middle of something stupid. Edie leaves. Then, against her better judgment, she turns around and decides to try to save him. It is the kind of bad decision thrillers are built on. This one pushes her into a situation that only gets dumber the longer she sticks around.
By the time the dust settles, Edie and John are tangled up with Nico again. Nico is no mastermind, but he has the muscle and the menace to make people do what he wants. He drafts the not quite happy couple into a simple plan that might as well be tattooed on a list of crime movie tropes. They are going to rob a casino for three million dollars. There will be pressure, guns, and a ticking clock. You have seen the skeleton of this story a hundred times. That is not even the issue. Familiar plots can sing if the characters feel alive. The problem is that the movie keeps throwing loud details at the wall and hoping you do not notice how flimsy the frame is.
One of those loud details shows up early when we learn that John has been keeping a card counter in a box. The card counter is played by Randall Park, who is a talented actor with comedy timing and a gift for the slow burn look. The image of a card counter hidden away like some kind of prize is meant to shock. It is the kind of weird twist you might giggle at in a midnight screening. But here it just lands with a thud. It makes John look like an idiot and a creep, which is fine if the movie wants you to root for Edie to leave him behind. The twist is that the movie still leans on their romance as something worth saving. It puts them on a path toward a sunset that neither the characters nor the audience has any reason to want.
This mismatch between what the story thinks it is and what it actually is keeps popping up. Writer and director Shawn Simmons pushes his leads together with the insistence of a matchmaker who refuses to read the room. Their chemistry never warms. Their scenes together have the energy of two people forced to rehearse lines on the same bus. It is not the fault of the actors as much as it is the way the script uses them. They are there to speak lines that play like clever little grenades. The kind of lines that sound great in a trailer or a highlight reel. Not the kind that grow out of human behavior. In the hands of a master like Tarantino, characters talking like the smartest person on earth can feel like jazz. Here it feels like homework.
The tonal target is not subtle. The movie wants to be hard edged and funny at the same time. It wants to show you people who are not nice and not smart and then find a rhythm that makes their chaos entertaining. That balancing act is brutal even for seasoned directors. Without a strong visual idea driving each scene you are left with noise. Simmons leans on raised voices and sudden violence to jump start momentum. It works for a minute or two. Then it wears out. You feel the repetition and you start checking your mental watch.
Along the way there are supporting players who show up in quick bursts. Marshawn Lynch appears and you think, okay, this could be fun. Chris Bauer is the kind of performer who can ground a scene with a glance. Mike O Malley and Dean Winters have carved out careers playing guys who light up the edges of stories. It is almost impressive how bland everyone feels here. Not a single one of them gets a real moment to build something memorable. They are used like furniture. Push them in front of the camera, let them say a few things, move them off to the side.
There is one exception. Steve Zahn drifts in at the beginning and then returns around the one hour mark as Edie’s father. He is a mess. He is not a role model. He does not have many minutes of screen time, but he uses them. You can tell Zahn thought about who this man was before the cameras rolled. He brings a lived in quality that makes the air in his scenes feel different. He does not try to smash jokes. He does not reach for swagger. He just shows you a person. It makes you realize how little of that exists elsewhere in the film. Suddenly you can see the movie that might have been if it had more interest in its characters than in its idea of being cool.
Tension is the other missing ingredient. A heist story thrives on pressure. The sense that the plan could fall apart at any second is the point. You need to worry about the details and the people handling those details. You want to feel the screws tightening. Eenie Meanie barely gets there. Scenes arrive that are supposed to be tense, but nothing builds. The camera cuts around, the score tries to pump your blood, and you sit there waiting for the feeling that never lands. Without that central heartbeat, the film becomes a list of events. One thing follows another. There is a chase. There is a standoff. Somebody yells. Nobody breathes.
It sits in the same zone with the dialogue. You can get away with making every character a mouthpiece if the voice is irresistible. If every line snaps and tells you something sly or dangerous or sad, you lean in. If it does not, you start wishing for silence. This script has a lot of lines that seem to exist for their own sake. They do not deepen the people saying them. They are trying to sound tough. The movie often mistakes cursing for a personality. It confuses a sudden punch with a shift in the story. The effect is numbing rather than exciting.
There is a bright patch late in the game. The final act delivers a driving sequence that has some real juice. You can sense the team waking up. The cars move with intent. The editing stops jittering long enough for you to follow what is happening. It is not going to blow the doors off any best of lists, but for a stretch you finally feel the movie achieving what it wanted to be. Sound, speed, propulsion. It proves that the filmmakers do know how to stage action when they focus. The trouble is that you have to sit through a long haul to get there. By the time the adrenaline shows up, your patience has thinned out.
Weaving does her best to keep you invested. She can play begrudging tenderness under the surface of a hardened stare. She can find little tilts in a line that make it feel like something a person would actually say. But the script keeps treating Edie as a piece on a board rather than a person making choices. Her motivation is supposed to be the pull of love and the weight of responsibility. You barely feel it. The pregnancy reveal should carry emotional stakes. It is instead a lever to move her into the next scenario. Edie’s decisions often make sense only because the plot says they have to happen. It is frustrating because you can see the actor searching for the real thread and finding it frayed.
As for John, the movie never explains why anyone would stand in his corner. He is introduced in a way that undercuts almost every reason to invest in him. If the plan was to write a redemption arc, it never really starts. If the plan was to make him a chaos agent, he is not charming enough. He ends up as a burden the film asks you to carry without giving you a reason to say yes. That is a rough ask even for a breezy romp. For a thriller that wants to grip you by the collar, it is a fatal flaw.
All of this circles back to the issue of influence and inspiration. There is nothing wrong with wearing your fandom on your sleeve. Many great films are built on the shoulders of the movies their creators love. But there is a difference between homage and mimicry. Tarantino builds scenes out of long conversations that feel like people talking on the edge of danger. Edgar Wright designs sequences like musical numbers where camera movement and sound sit in perfect rhythm. You can borrow that energy, but you need your own pulse running underneath. Eenie Meanie borrows the clothes and forgets to bring a body to fill them.
The visual style rarely announces a point of view. Shots are composed with competence, but they do not tell a story on their own. The editing cuts to spice rather than to reveal. The score tries to nudge you toward emotions that have not been earned. You never feel the camera fall in love with a character, or an object, or a streetlight the way the great stylists do. Instead you feel a checklist being worked through. The result is not actively bad in every moment. It is simply thin. A fast food cheeseburger of a movie without the salt and the bite that at least make junk food fun.
If there is a version of this film that works, it lives in the margins. Focus on Edie’s relationship with her father and you have a skeletal drama about inherited damage and the cost of staying in the life. Put more weight on Edie as a person who wants out and refuses, and you could get a character study with a heist running in the background like a drumbeat. Or lean fully into farce. Let the idiocy of the crooks be the point, and use the ensemble to play that up. The film as released does not pick a lane. It bounces from tough to silly to sentimental and back again without ever choosing a tone it can hold.
The running time is ninety four minutes, which should be perfect for a punchy thriller. You want that kind of film to snap, to hit hard and end early. Even at that length you feel the drag. Scenes that should be tight are padded. Scenes that should breathe are clipped. The rhythm is off. When a movie has no sense of build, even a short sprint can feel like a marathon.
Would someone enjoy this anyway. Maybe. If you are in the mood for background noise with a few jabs of action and you like to watch Samara Weaving try to elevate material, you could pass a lazy evening with it. You might grin when Steve Zahn shows up and steals his scenes. You might perk up at the final chase. You might also find yourself pausing to do something else and forgetting to hit play again for a while.
What stings is that there is talent here. Weaving has star energy. Garcia can do charming and dangerous in his sleep. Randall Park can slip from deadpan to wounded in an instant. Marshawn Lynch is a wild card who can be genuinely funny on screen. Chris Bauer, Mike O Malley, Dean Winters, and Steve Zahn have all proven they can turn small parts into something you remember. The potential is all over the credits. It never coalesces.
In the end, Eenie Meanie feels like a collage of cool ideas that do not belong to it. The film confuses profanity with attitude, and it mistakes sudden bursts of violence for actual plotting. It corrals a bunch of people who are not very bright and asks you to spend an hour and a half in a room with them while they yell. Some filmmakers can transform that kind of chaos into art. Some can at least turn it into a guilty pleasure. This one does not have the grip or the gaze to get there.
I wanted to like it. I really did. There are flashes that suggest a sharper, funnier, more distinct film waiting in the wings. There is a version where Edie walks away at the beginning and the camera follows her instead, and maybe that movie surprises us. The version we have settles for imitation, and the imitation is not enough. When the credits roll, you are left with the faint memory of better movies and a single thought. It did not have to be this way. But it is.
