Action Deficiency Dooms Samara Weaving’s Scattershot Eenie Meanie

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It’s a bit of an odd coincidence that director Shawn Simmons’ Eenie Meanie finds itself spinning burnouts in its Hulu debut this weekend only a few months after another feature film, Borderline, also starred Samara Weaving in a story that was notable for just how dramatically it veered from the tone implied by the movie’s marketing. For Borderline, it was an unusual bit of bait-and-switch, setting expectations of Weaving as the main character of a home invasion thriller, only for the film to instead be more interested in just about everyone other than its ostensible star, making up for that oddity with some committedly gonzo performances from the likes of Ray Nicholson and Alba Baptista. Eenie Meanie, on the other hand, doesn’t waffle on whether Weaving is our star; it simply misleads on just about everything else. What its trailers portray as a wild, lighthearted action comedy about a frazzled getaway driver is instead an oddly grim, serious, even tearful fusion of humorless heist caper and relationship/crime drama … one that is simply bookended by a pair of passable car chases. Weaving may be one of the most capable young actresses in Hollywood, particularly when it comes to self-deprecating comedy, but Eenie Meanie’s screenplay gives her few opportunities to really show off what she can do, despite ostensibly being tailor-made for her. Or to put it another way: There’s a serious deficiency of velocity here for a film with muscle cars splashed across its poster.

The film even struggles to rationalize its own awkward title, which is the nickname of Weaving’s character “Edie Meanie,” once given to her by local crime boss Nico (Andy Garcia), because–get this–turns out she’s capable of being “mean.” There’s no other rationale or connection to the childrens’ counting rhyme; it reads like a title that was simply available to be copyrighted, which was all the excuse Simmons apparently needed as writer-director to pluck it from a list. We’re told that the mean Miss Edie has struggled through a lifetime of cleaning up others’ messes, something we do get a good sense of in the opening scene set in 2007 Cleveland, in which a 14-year-old Edie is forced to evade police by her scumbag father, played in Righteous Gemstones Season 3 mode by a scuzzy Steve Zahn. This leads to teen years spent as a wheel-gal for various criminal enterprises, a lifestyle that also introduces her to her screwup former lover John (Karl Glusman), until the now older and wiser Edie finally decides to leave that life behind once and for all.

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This is where Eenie Meanie picks up with Weaving, now “14 years later, still Cleveland,” having received the full “getting my life back together” cinematic package: Crappy apartment, dead end job, community college, the works. John has been out of her life for months; she’s saving and striving, and things seem to be turning around … except for the revelation that she’s apparently 3 or 4 months pregnant with his child, having never noticed anything was amiss until a doctor’s visit because “I have a history of skipping periods.” Returning to the pad of her ex in order to drop some major news on the guy, Edie is instead sucked into another underworld misadventure when she finds that John–the father of her growing child–is now a target of Nico thanks to his spectacular ability to incompetently botch jobs. Soon, the pair is on the hook to Garcia’s heavy–having apparently been told to exactly channel himself from Ocean’s 11–forced to join up with a crew in a heist that will steal a car loaded with $3 million from a local casino, in order to save John’s skin.

That’s perfectly serviceable motivation for your classical heist action movie or comedy, but this is where Eenie Meanie gets genuinely strange, as it enters the moribund 70-minute, action-free period that makes up its entire interior. The over-the-top car chases, gunplay and zany comedy tone it attempts to establish in its first 20 minutes (and early, Baby Driver-esque car chase) are here abandoned, and we’re suddenly given far, far more breathing room with the characters, as they discuss the intricate planning of the upcoming heist and Edie and John (and her father?) reconnect emotionally and romantically despite her doomed insistence that she won’t let them fall back into their old rhythms. Would you be expecting tearful family reconciliations in your action comedy? How about multiple tearful family reconciliations, in the space of a couple of scenes? The committed turn toward dialogue-driven melodrama–especially once John learns about the pregnancy–completely kills whatever momentum has been built, leaving the viewer asking something along the lines of “Wait, wasn’t there supposed to be a casino heist in here?” One wonders why Simmons chose to weight the film so heavily in this direction, or if tender conversations are simply more economical than explosive action set pieces.

Pair that oddly serious tone, meanwhile, with an approach toward violence that increasingly takes a turn for the genuinely dark and borderline disturbing, and it makes for a bizarre tonal departure from Eenie Meanie’s initial establishment of the characters. The relationship between Edie and John in particular is recontextualized throughout; from cliched bitter exes, to buddingly earnest and romantic, to undeniably toxic and tragic thanks to John’s inconsistent and borderline psychotic impulsivity. Weaving is playing a character who is ultimately traumatized by far more viciousness and single-minded misanthropy than you’d ever expect to encounter in a screenplay like this, in which characters are typically ready to shrug off death and misadventure in order to keep the mood light. Eenie Meanie, on the other hand, has its protagonists executing both enemies and allies in cold blood, or killing a cameo-ing Randall Park in a split-second accident that is more shockingly random than humorous. The screenplay is asking Weaving as Edie to genuinely and realistically wade through the very real trauma of having been culpable in these instances of violence and death, but this pivot only makes the eventual return to comedy seem more out of place. The film needed to be either a dark, moody story about criminals seeking a way to break out of the ruinous track of their exploited lives, for the sake of a baby … or a winking, snarky heist comedy with a charismatic lead character. It instead tries to do both simultaneously, and the clash between those elements is distinctly awkward.

On the plus side, Weaving is also given reason to hurl plenty of F-bombs, a task she always attacks with gusto, alongside a few of her trademark, ululating screams. Those meager features are not enough, however, to make up for a general lack of action in terms of both quantity and quality, nor the watered down execution of heist tropes that were already receiving a spit shine when Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11 glitzed its way into theaters in 2001. A highlight is the final escape of the stolen Charger from the casino–most of it executed in reverse–but Eenie Meanie lacks the same kind of propulsive, high-energy and kinetic cinematography that brought to life the likes of Baby Driver or Fury Road. Competent, uninspired camerawork and a few nice car stunts and flips are also undercut by what is too often staccato, unclear editing, regardless of whether there’s a high speed vehicle anywhere in the frame to use as an excuse. One of the film’s most visually perplexing moments, in fact, occurs during an opening bank robbery, in which Edie gets knocked out through a blow that is depicted with such choppy abruptness that we pretty much have to simply take Edie’s word for it when she later refers to having been pistol whipped. Maybe the bank security footage caught that moment, because the DP’s cameras didn’t.

All in all, it makes for a middling and tonally schizophrenic heist movie, caught in a wide gulf between the action comedy it probably should have been, and the sober-minded psychological thriller it’s increasingly trying to be, for reasons unknown. Samara Weaving has a knack for elevating this kind of dreck–it worked out alright in Borderline–but the screenplay of Eenie Meanie presents problems that not even the fastest car can outrun.

Director: Shawn Simmons
Writer: Shawn Simmons
Stars: Samara Weaving, Karl Glusman, Andy Garcia, Jermaine Fowler, Marshawn Lynch, Randall Park, Steve Zahn, Mike O’Malley
Release date: Aug. 22, 2025 (Hulu)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.