EENIE MEANIE - Mark Reviews Movies

Eenie Meanie, Hulu

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 21, 2025

It's impressive how the final act of Eenie Meanie elevates what has been a pretty standard heist thriller, filled with several colorful characters and a few scenes of sharp dialogue. Writer/director Shawn Simmons eventually arrives at something awash in melancholy and tragedy, because he understands that some of these characters are doomed to patterns of certain behavior. There are only two ways out in this situation. One of them is to change something vital about one's personality or the choices one makes. Since that seems impossible for some of these characters, there's the other way.

That this honesty comes after a lot of plot and a couple of fast car chases is a genuine surprise, as well as a slight disappointment. If the movie had this within it the entire time, why does it take so long to finally get there?

What does come before that last stretch of the story, though, isn't wasted, at least. Indeed, it possesses its moments, especially when Simmons does hint at something deeper among and inside the story's assorted and eclectic characters and archetypes.

There is, of course, the protagonist whose nickname provides the title. She's Edie Meanie (Samara Weaving), who didn't have a particularly good life with her parents, who often drank to excess at a local bar and called on their underage daughter to drive them home, and had a worse one after winding up the foster system. That happened after one night of the parents' drinking, when her father (played by Steve Zahn) told 14-year-old Edie (played by Elle Graham) to floor it after being pulled over by the cops, because the girl's mother had a bunch of cocaine on her.

The story proper picks up 14 years after that, as Edie is working at a bank, going to community college, and, ironically, trying to escape her career as a getaway driver for crime boss Nico (Andy Garcia). The one thing that keeps pulling her back in is her now-ex-boyfriend John (Karl Glusman), whom she realizes got her pregnant on her last slip back to him three months ago. She discovers that after being pistol-whipped by some incompetent robbers at the bank where she works, and if Simmons' screenplay feels as if it's trying to give us narrative whiplash in its opening act, that might be an appropriate, if clunky, way to begin.

The plot proper, meanwhile, starts when Edie goes to tell John that she is pregnant. She finds her ex naked and being beaten by a couple of Nico's thugs. A perpetual screwup, John messed up again, and after an extended chase—on foot and by car—and some genuinely surprising misfortune involving a card counter (played by a drolly funny Randall Park), the guy owes Nico $3 million. The crime boss knows a way to steal that amount of cash, and after threatening to kill John, Edie begrudgingly agrees to lead the robbery and act as the getaway driver.

What sticks here isn't the plot, of which there is a lot more—involving a car swap, planning an open theft in and an escape route through a casino, and the mysterious appearance of Nico's current go-to driver Perm Walters (Marshawn Lynch) at said casino just before the heist. Instead, it's the quieter moments between characters, such as when Edie tries to explain why she feels so connected to the hot-headed and prone-to-unforced-errors John while talking to the Chaperone (Jermaine Fowler), a guy who knows how to get anything.

They talk business, obviously, but the core of their conversation is about family, what they want, and why they're drawn to things, people, and a life that might not get them what they actually want. Simmons shows a degree of subtlety in this and other moments that, while it doesn't necessarily fit within the context of the plot-heavy script at the moment, gives us a sense that there's more to these characters than, well, how they move and operate through that plot.

The key relationship, though, belongs to Edie and John, who have known each other since they were both kids caught up in the foster system, have seen and done too much together to just put a clean end to their bond, and are at an obvious crossroads at this moment. Edie wants to change and has been putting in the work to do so. When John learns Edie is pregnant, he says he wants to change, in order to be a partner to her and a father to their child who's better than the person he is now. The movie can be funny in the eccentricities of its characters and occasionally brutal in its violence, but as few and far between as they are, such scenes of tenderness between and Simmons' compassion for these players do pay off eventually.

In the moments when they happen, however, it's a bit too easy to miss the significance of those scenes in the bigger picture of the story. That's in part because Eenie Meanie is so busy with its dark humor and assembling its plotting, which means the character work often clashes with its surroundings. It's also because Simmons doesn't offer the real context of those moments until the payoff actually happens. When it does, the movie becomes something unexpectedly sincere in the tragic nature of these characters—even if it is a bit too hurried and late.

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