EENIE MEANIE is a crime movie that went straight to Hulu last week. It stars Samara Weaving (MONSTER TRUCKS, THE BABYSITTER, READY OR NOT, AZRAEL) and I like that lady so I watched it.

Weaving plays Edith Meaney. The title is a cute nickname a bad person gave her – she prefers Edie. Orphaned by her dad (Steve Zahn, WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES) going to prison, she somehow fell into being a teenage getaway driver for grown up criminals. Many years later she’s away from that world, going to school – even got a job at a bank! – until, you know, an inciting incident.

It’s triggered by her bank being robbed, but it really has nothing to do with that. She ends up in the hospital, where a blood test finds that she’s pregnant. Against her better judgment she decides to go find the father, her ex-boyfriend John (Karl Glusman, THE NEON DEMON, THE BIKERIDERS), and let him know.

We’ll learn more about their long history as the movie goes on, but in a nutshell he’s a perpetual fuckup she was with for nearly 15 years, and finally broke it off three and a half months ago. When she comes into his apartment it seems like he’s in the middle of fucking somebody (awkward but not unexpected) but apparently that has already been interrupted by some guys who are beating the shit out of him over some scheme he tried to pull (also awkward but not unexpected).

Edie sneaks out before the attackers see her and leaves the building muttering “Fuck that piece of shit” to herself. But then, of course she stops and thinks about it. A defining characteristic of Edie – she can’t stop helping this bozo.

So she storms in and gets John out of there, making a run for it while he’s buck naked. The enforcers give chase, Edie and John end up in a car, she uses her precision driving skills, we’re off to the races, you could say.

She gets another chance to almost leave him dangling and then change her mind. It turns out this all has to do with a heist gone south and then the kidnapping of a card counter (Randall Park, AQUAMAN) gone even more south. John now owes 3 million to Edie’s former employer Nico (Andy Garcia, DEAD AGAIN) and she can help him by being the driver on a job to steal a car full of money that’s the prize in a poker tournament.

She knows she shouldn’t do it. And she probly knows she’s gonna do it anyway. At first she turns it down, though, and the way Garcia plays it, saying “Well, thanks for hearing me out,” I think he’s sincerely gonna let her go. (Another small touch I liked with the Nico character: his first scene making a scary phone call casually reveals at the end that he made it from a hospital waiting room. Turns out to mean something, but it wouldn’t have to.)

They do join the team, led by somebody called The Chaperone, played by Jermaine Fowler (STING) who I think can be a bit much in his comedy roles but is good here in a more dramatic one. What ensues is a well-made car movie, though not in that overwhelming LAST BULLET sort of way that makes a non-car guy like me think, “Oh shit – cars, huh?” She drives a car backwards through a casino floor, forward through the back hallways, through a parking garage (always gotta be a parking garage), through streets, and onto a race track (why not?). The stunt coordinator is Keith Campbell (Paul Dano’s stunt double in THE FABELMANS), vehicle stunt coordinator is Michael B. Johnson (assistant stunt coordinator and stunt driver in 6 UNDERGROUND). Also I noticed Simon Rhee (Dae Han from BEST OF THE BEST and BEST OF THE BEST 2) is a stunt performer on it.

I like the car chases but I come to it more as an enjoyer of crime fiction. You get your standing around-a-table-discussing-the-plan scenes, your preparation and practice montages – I like that type of stuff. EENIE MEANIE is written and directed by Shawn Simmons, a TV writer mostly for comedies I haven’t heard of, but his most recent work is three episodes of The Continental – a JOHN WICK spin-off that Stahelski and company had little involvement in and have distanced themselves from, but I thought it was pretty good TV. So I’m not surprised that this is an enjoyable tale with some good characters and laughs.

It’s one of those crime movies where everybody is a talker, which at times is the appeal. There are some good insults (her friend [Kyanna Simone] calls a guy lanky by saying “Ain’t you got to work? Standing outside a dealership, floppin’ around?”) and perfectly delivered lines like John’s reaction to Edie screaming “If I had a time machine I’d hit the button that said, ‘The day before you met John’s stupid fucking ass!’”

There are times where it’s not seamless, like when Nico uses insults like “dick nugget,” and I am required by law to inform you that it absolutely has that feel of “you know what, I bet I could write dialogue like Tarantino!” that we saw so much of in the ‘90s. There are things that feel just a little too self conscious, like when they go off on tangents about egg salad sandwiches in the middle of crime talk, but mostly I’m talking about the scene where John, who otherwise is defined as a guy who always comes across as a doofus no matter how hard he tries, suddenly talks like a Reservoir Dog:

“Hey, if shit’s a summer breeze shit’s a summer breeze. Obviously that’s what I prefer. But that person right there… That’s my whole world. And if someone tries to take that away from me and shit goes from summer breeze to wild wild west real quick, well… ride ‘em fuckin cowboy.”

I mean, come on, dude. A very small part of me gets warm nostalgic feelings that we’re doing this again, but most of me thinks I would prefer it found a natural feeling voice of its own.

I needed to say that to set expectations to realistic levels, so now I can praise it as mostly kind of an Elmore Leonard adjacent tone, with the dumb guy as sort of an underdog hero more than dangerous time bomb waiting to go off. Admittedly it sometimes leans more GET SHORTY goofy than OUT OF SIGHT perfection, but it’s sincere about its characters and it has the powerful weapon of Weaving in its glove box. Maybe sometimes her tough girl accent doesn’t quite fly, but she doesn’t need words to sell the emotions. For example, it’s heartbreaking to see her unconvincing smile in the scene where she goes to see her dad for the first time in 18 years and (spoiler) learns that he has a happy upper middle class life with a new wife and daughter.

I also have to credit Glusman, who I didn’t recognize from a bunch of movies I really liked and that he was good in (he was the husband in WATCHER! I loved that movie!). It’s a layered character, comical at the top (during a tense meeting with Nico he asks “Are those for everybody?” about a bowl of candy on his desk), frustrating underneath (he is almost constantly doing things that make Edie say “What the fuck John – are you serious?”). But the trick is that in the end I feel like I have a soft spot for him, even if he mostly sucks.

That’s what surprised me most – I actually got on board for the love story part. How sweet I thought it was fluctuated depending on how much he engrained himself to me, but I liked that he kept trying and that she could still like him. I guess the appeal of Mostly Reformed Getaway Driver Dream Girl Who Forgives Most of Your Fuck-Ups is pretty straight forward, but mostly you see it from her point-of-view as a person who knows her life will always be fucked up but never gives up on finding a way to rearrange it so she’s happy. There are some tonal shifts that for me were very effective.

Other reviews I’ve seen have been much more high on the movie than I am, but I definitely recommend it if you have Hulu and room in your life for low key I-feel-like-something-crimey viewing.

Additional notes:

Football star Marshawn Lynch is in this – I just saw him in FREAKY TALES. This one is not just a cameo, he plays another driver for Nico who’s staying in the casino so Edie knows something is up.

Dean Winters shows up in one short scene as a car salesman – he was also in HIGHEST 2 LOWEST, released the same week. The Week of Winters.

This joins such films as THE LAND, AMERICAN SPLENDOR, DIRTY WORK, GHOST IN THE MACHINE, KILL THE IRISHMAN, LIGHT OF DAY, PREDESTINATION, UP TIGHT, and HOWARD THE DUCK in being set in Cleveland.