Directed by Shawn Simmons — Screenplay by Shawn Simmons.
Shawn Simmons’ Eenie Meanie is a crime comedy-thriller that follows Edie (played by Samara Weaving), who has a past as a getaway driver. Edie has just found out that she is pregnant, and so she decides to seek out the child’s ne’er-do-well father, John (played by Karl Glusman), whom she hasn’t been with in months. When she shows up at his apartment, however, she becomes entangled in a web of crime to which her former lover is stuck. To save the father of her child, Edie will have to put some of her old skills to good use to do a job.
I do normally get a lot of enjoyment out of the cheap thrills of crime comedy getaway and/or heist flicks. Eenie Meanie doesn’t quite succeed as much as I had hoped, though, as it not only often feels generic but also is poorly paced. Don’t get me wrong, on occasion, it does speed away like a getaway driver and show glimpses of goodness, but the good here does not outweigh the underwhelming or the boring. I think, for many, this film will struggle to hold their attention, as it doesn’t nail an emotional investment in anything other than the film’s lead, Samara Weaving, who expertly turns in a charismatic performance that nails the tone the film is going for. Although I think it has more misses than hits when it comes to good comedy, Weaving’s delivery help certain jokes to land (and she even does a good job with the more serious notes she has to nail), and though her screen partner Karl Glusman isn’t given a lot of meat on the bone to his character, they’re a watchable duo on screen, even if the film too often moves at a slow speed that makes your eyes glaze over.
However, a big problem for me here was that I never bought into the romantic relationship or got emotionally invested in them being together. Rather, you start asking yourself why our lead character insists on going along with Glusman’s. Although the film features a relatively well-known cast, their characters don’t leave the desired imprint on your viewing experience.
The film lacks the visual dynamism, consistent laughs, and memorable, colorful characters that may have been able to outweigh the film’s pacing issues and tonal shifts that sometimes grind the film to a halt (it reaches for serious drama when it eventually becomes about the lives that parents bring their children into, among other things). As a result, Eenie Meanie is an unmemorable and relatively ineffective crime comedy-thriller, whose biggest selling point is that Samara Weaving is consistently good in this. It definitely isn’t a complete dud, but it is insufficiently entertaining and fairly unremarkable.
5.5 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
I'm Jeffrey Rex 