Everyone loves a great car pursuit film. Heck, everyone likes a very good car pursuit film. Even a car pursuit film which is simply higher than the average has a universal appeal. “Eenie Meanie”, the start of the feature film of the writer / director Shawn Simmons (“Wayne”), try to be great. It’s often good. Most of the time, it has a universal appeal.
Samara Weaving, one of the big stars of Hollywood cinema has not yet understood how to become a star, plays Edith. She is a driver from AS de l’As, since she was a teenager, but she has tried to straighten and fly to the right. She goes to university. She works in a bank. The only problem is his ex-friend John (Karl Glusman). He is a drug addict with problems with impulse control and he cannot remain in difficulty. Edith can understand: she is dependent on John, and cannot resist the urge to get back to him. No matter how much he ruins his life.
Just when Edith thought she was finally above him, a few months after their last badly wise adventure, she discovers that she is pregnant. When she tries to tell John that he is tortured by henchmen who turn firearms, then they run away in a high -speed pursuit. It turns out that John has, for the umpteenth time, did something extremely chaotic. Now he owes millions of dollars to their former crime boss, Nico (Andy Garcia), who would seem to be a pretty nice guy if he didn’t want to remove John’s skeleton from his body.
Again, now that we know John, we can tell. John is a garbage fire in human skin. Although nobody can fully decode the quantum mechanics of the human heart, for many “eenie meania”, we have no idea what Edith sees in this shock. He can’t even wait in a car for 30 minutes without abandoning the simplest work in the world and starting a bar fight. John actively ruins Edith’s life in an innumerable way. It is not unattractive, fairly fair, and there is a puppy charm for its inhabitants, but we are not talking about a guy who has a potential and who has not yet applied. John makes people kill, all the time, on purpose and by accident, and he will probably also have Edith killed if she leaves him.
At one point, Simmons seems to realize that we have no idea what Edith sees in John, so he gives her a speech to explain what he means for her, and impressively, we finally get him. We understand why she is faithful. We understand why she doesn’t want him to be dead. We just don’t understand why she wants.
“Eenie Meanie” is a relational film, a speaking film and Quippy on people who love each other but have not understood that love does not solve all the problems. Sometimes love is the problem. Samara Weaving and Karl Glusman are credible as people who probably have good hearts, but have not found good ways to use them. They carry the emotional weight of Shawn Simmons’s film on their capable shoulders.
But it is also a criminal film, and it is not particularly memorable. The only way to save the life of John is – naturally – to draw a large casino and – of course – this involves driving a muscle car through the building. The robbery is planned how the robberies are always planned. Car proceedings, although there are not many, are Nifty. The culminating pursuit includes an element of chaos which, frankly, is so unconventional and exciting, I am surprised that we have not seen it before in many other films. This suggests that perhaps, a few drafts on the line (or some drafts, if the development process kept on the way), there was a version of “Eenie Meanie” which would have had some additional tips in its sleeve.
The scenario of Shawn Simmons strives, in each scene, to give each character a catchy dialogue in the post-“pulp fiction” mold. But the chatter quickly fades in a background. It is never intelligent enough or funny enough to raise this equipment. What makes work “Eenie Meanie”, what he mainly does (to one degree another) is his sincerity. When the robbery runs up to a roadblock, and Edith’s backup plan reveals that they have changed their lives and left the business, it is not a moment for our hero panic because it cannot solve a problem. Is it a moment for introspection because, wait a minute, why nobody in Edith’s life likes him enough to change too?
“Eenie Meanie” plays as a decent adaptation of an unpublished Elmore Leonard novel. Even the title seems to be on a Spinner rack next to “Freaky Deaky” and “Rum Punch”. Shawn Simmons cannot quite nail this relaxed dialect. Its pages and pages of dialogue appear on ways and arcs. But he has a fun distribution of characters to work with, and he thought them with more psychological depth than many similar criminal films.
And while this car prosecution film would have benefited from more car prosecution, what we get is a spell and dare to say “cool”. But it’s relatively easy to be cool. Anyone can give a paler film. The bandits of “Eenie Meanie” needed more than Swag if they wanted to be really out of sight.
