Eenie Meanie is a film with such terrific vehicular action that it’s very disappointing that everything else is so paint-by-numbers. At the center of Eenie Meanie is a charismatic performance by Samara Weaving, a promising young “scream queen” whose strong work in Ready or Not and Scream VI signified her as a prominent voice in modern horror. Weaving’s character Edie is a cross between Ansel Elgort’s “Baby” in Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver and Nicolas Cage’s "Memphis Raines” in the ridiculous remake of Gone in 60 Seconds; she’s willing to add some theatrics to throw her pursuers off guard, but not if it comes at the sake of a mission. But any enigmatic aspects of Weaving’s characterization are dropped within the first few minutes of Eenie Meanie, which feature unnecessary flashbacks to the traumatic childhood she faced with her absent father (Steve Zahn).
To not start a car chase thriller in the midst of a frenzied heist-gone-wrong is already a sin, but the surprisingly mawkishness of Eenie Meanie is detrimental to Weaving’s star power. Despite the best efforts made by Eenie Meanie to insist that it’s a “back-to-basics” work of genre entertainment, it’s a film so overworked that it has forgotten what made those classics stick out. It’d be hard to name a single thing about the backstory of Steve McQueen’s character in Bullitt, other than that he’s a talented driver with no patience for criminals and cheaters. Perhaps that bare-boned approach would’ve denied Eenie Meanie the emotional suspense that it’s aimed at, but it’d be preferable to extended sequences of melodrama that the filmmakers clearly don’t care about.
It may be unfair to accuse Eenie Meanie of being derivative of other recent car-chase thrillers like Baby Driver or Drive; after countless superhero films, is it really bad if there are three car chase adventures with basically the same plot? Still, comparisons to what Wright and Nicolas Winding Refn did doesn’t do Eenie Meanie any favors when it comes to its romantic storyline. Both Drive and Baby Driver undercut the intensity of their street-level action with surprisingly earnest, innocent stories of “love at first sight;” for both Baby and Ryan Gosling’s unnamed driver, a brief connection with a beautiful woman was a justification to put their life of crime behind.
Eenie Meanie isn’t as straightforward, even if it’s intended to end up in the same place. After she’s offered the chance to finally get a “clean slate” from her ruthless boss Nico (Andy Garcia), Edie’s paired with her ex-boyfriend John (Karl Glusman), whose wisecracking attitude is a sharp contest to her serious demeanor. Although Weaving and Glusman feel like they’ve just picked up from where the characters last saw each other, references to their previous adventures are more interesting than anything they do together in Eenie Meanie.
The MacGuffin in a heist movie doesn't have to matter, but it helps if the protagonists have a reason to perform a difficult burglary that doesn’t have anything to do with money. In Ocean’s Eleven, Danny Ocean’s (George Clooney) Las Vegas casino stickup is merely an elaborate ploy to win back his ex-wife, Tess (Julia Roberts). Eenie Meanie has a similar casino heist, but there’s no suggestion that a successful operation will fundamentally change the lives of either Edie or John. Both characters are destined to find trouble wherever they go, even if the film is unusually determined to convince the audience otherwise.
The muted romantic tension between Edie and John is so deflated that the film is reverted to a father-daughter story just before any of the more elaborate shenanigans begin. To his credit, Zahn does a lot with a little because Edie’s father has reached the uncomfortable conclusion that his daughter’s life would be better without his presence. Zahn’s performance is good enough that it’s easy to imagine a better film that was centered on his redemptive journey. His only function is to deliver a few saccharine lines about destiny, truth, and purpose, which are seemingly inserted to suggest that Eenie Meanie is about something.
The archaic plot mechanics of Eenie Meanie are particularly frustrating because its brief bursts of action show promise. When compared to the gravity-defying stupidity of The Fast and the Furious franchise, Eenie Meanie is grounded in a real world where the vehicles stop, start, and spring to life in a realistic enough fashion. Even if there’s nothing in Eenie Meanie that action buffs haven’t seen before, its neo-western aesthetics are refreshingly pulpy.
Eenie Meanie was written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, a successful screenwriting duo who cracked the code for Hollywood paychecks; between the Deadpool films, Zombieland, and Michael Bay’s 6 Underground, the pair have made derivative material feel substantially original thanks to the successful application of a few one-liners. Eenie Meanie may have been their attempt to make something deeper, but it's only further proof that they should take their “back-to-basics” principle to heart.