Don’t be a Meanie While Watching “Eenie Meanie”

Movies like Eenie Meanie really make me feel confident in my rating system. I didn’t know a thing about the movie except for the fact that Samara Weaving was in it. It’s always more fun to go into a movie blind! Then I decided to check the reviews.

Despite what critical and audience scores will swear up and down and left and right that this is a bad movie, I can promise you, Eenie Meanie is a very fun movie.

Discussing YMMV

Let me ask you something. 

What makes a movie “good”? What makes a movie enjoyable? What rounds out a film’s principles? When does a movie bow to the principles of a good story? When does a movie look good enough? Sound good enough? Dialogue well enough? When is enough? Is enough is enough? Well. Enough.

After I finished Eenie Meanie, I went to reddit and IMDb, and holy crap, I have never disagreed with people’s opinions on a specific movie more than for Eenie Meanie. I’m not going to lie to you and say that this movie is one of the best movies of all time. 

The movie Eenie Meanie isn’t a car movie. It’s not even a heist movie. It’s sort of a crime movie, but even then, it’s not that. Eenie Meanie is a movie about a woman who fell in love with the worst fucking guy possible. This movie is just a treatise on how extraordinary women latch onto subpar men, and what they wish they could do to be free of their dumbass obsessions.

So if you decided to talk about car races, theft, or crime? I mean. Eenie Meanie doesn’t really let you down. There’s two very good car scenes. The heist is planned and executed as well as one could expect- and the movie even throws in a fun, minor twist to keep you guessing. The crime? The whole reason this movie happens is because of crime. Not just crime, but why people decide to go against a society’s rules to find their own path toward financial gains. 

So despite all these great things going for Eenie Meanie, people still hold a negative view on the film. A lot of people say they felt disconnected at the end. Just to avoid spoilers so early in the review, there’s a very surprising and emotionally impactful event, which is then followed by a climactic scene that’s relatively quiet and emotional. I will concede that these two events were very surprising, and the end does not leave you feeling satisfied. For a movie that spent its entire runtime being careful to set things up before executing, the climax felt less-than. 

That said, I don’t think that the film overall is bad because of the ending. The ending is logical. It’s emotional. It is bittersweet. 

The Game of Thrones Promise

I have a lot of thoughts about the Game of Thrones show and how it ended, but what really sticks out for me is the idea that we were promised a “bittersweet” ending. When I first read that, I didn’t know what it meant. And when I watched the end of the show, I didn’t feel like the show’s finale really fit that adjective.

What is “bittersweet” after all? It’s an end that leaves you in a grimace, right? Some good, some bad. A tearful goodbye, maybe? 

So regardless of the mess that was GoT, Eenie Meanie fits the description of “bittersweet”. I don’t know that a movie about thieves should end any other way. Thieves who steal from casinos are antiheros by definition, so their endings should also fall in some middle purgatory. They’re not designed for happy endings, nor do they deserve sad endings. In fact, in modern film, if it’s not a horror, people don’t like if their protagonists have a sad ending. It’s not something people are ok with. So movies give their protagonist something to hang their hat on.

This bittersweet ending isn’t something people are used to, I think, in movies that aren’t horror. Or, if you’re gonna be a pretentious fuck about it, in high-brow comedies from prolific directors.

Or even

I think that what really threw people off was the extreme reaction Samara Weaving’s character had to her boy lover’s actions. But we can all agree that the guy was a fucking menace. He was a trashy, out of control loser. She was a mature, capable, and brave woman. Their partnership only worked because she had a romantic weakness for him, and that was an absolute staple of this film. Was her reaction extreme? Yes. Was it justified? Honestly? Realistically? Yeah, man. Given that she lived in an extreme world with violence and she struggled mightily to resist the guy? I mean. She needs therapy twice a week, but I get it!

So when we get the ending that we did, and I know my spoiler-free ambiguity is getting irritating, I promise you, it feels truly bittersweet. Bitter over what Weaving’s character lost, and sweet over what she built for herself. If you consider the world of crime and mafias, theft and burglary, guns and cars, is it truly that far-fetched the way the movie ended?

Figuring Out How to Spell Misogininy

I know I’m cosplaying Icarus flying far too close to an incel sun, but I gotta say, I have seen way, way too many women in my life pairing up with truly gross men. Marines. Tesla execs. MAGA fanboys. Literal fucking sexual predators. Dudes who eat pizza out of the garbage can. Dudes who want to set up a DSLR on a tripod for their first hookup. And dude. Dude? DUDE. The girls went with it. I know that this male frustration about women choosing crap partners is a concept that’s borderline fucking sexist. I get it.

But. Do we really get why that happens? It’s not just because they have abs and a 10 inch schlong. It’s not that. It’s about the nearly imperceptible minutiae of a woman’s sexuality. It’s not just something stupid or superficial. Sometimes, it’s something that we can never know about. 

So if you felt like Weaving’s character was stupid or unconvincing in why she felt drawn to John, then you’re very, very bad at girls. If you felt that her reaction to his climactic sins was overdramatic, I think you’d really enjoy “my bitch wife” jokes. 

Eenie Meanie, despite failing the Bechdel Test, felt like a relatively female-forward movie. It wasn’t feminist by any strict and serious standards, but it was a movie about a woman, a woman’s love, a woman’s drive, a woman’s abilities, and a woman’s flaws. With the exception of Marshawn Lynch’s character, every aspect of this film screamed that it was a female-forward film. Where they easily could have made John the extraordinary driver, relegated Weaving’s character to be his motivation, and magnified her sexuality. Instead we got a relatively nuanced tale about a woman’s ability to make things work, her weaknesses, overcoming that weakness, and how she found a home and future in her abilities (even if that future involves child-rearing). 

So when you see a deluge of negative reviews for Eenie Meanie, and you see comparisons to Baby Driver and heist films like Gone in 60 Seconds or Ocean’s 11, I want you to understand that these people missed the fucking point. The cars, the theft, the crime; it is all just a veneer for the central story of a woman who gets caught up in a world of crimes and thievery for the sake of her weakness for a truly shitty man.

You will likely see people praising Samara Weaving, and while she is stellar in this film, I didn’t think she necessarily acted circles around the rest of the cast. There wasn’t a truly bad performance from anyone. Even throwaway bartender characters have so much personality to them that even though Weaving was great, she’s not necessarily a standout. In fact, even Marshawn Lynch, who makes a very surprising appearance in this film, was great too.

I would also like you all to praise my self restraint while talking about Samara Weaving this whole, entire review. Even the section where I misspelled “misogyny” in the heading.

Conclusion

So I got a little carried away. Does Eenie Meanie deserve this huge wall of text? I mean kind of. There are so few crime movies, and even fewer shows (which I don’t write about, much to The Penguin’s chagrin) that are female-centric, if not absolutely feminist. Again, I’m not saying Eenie Meanie is some Tarantino or Coen-level movie. It’s not. But it’s close. And it only doesn’t measure up because it’s not a fucking incredible fucking movie. It’s good. It’s great, even. It’s not groundbreaking by any means. But it is, not in any logical sense, a bad movie. 

So to return to my early queries regarding YMMV, I gotta say, Eenie Meanie doesn’t really fail or suck at anything it was trying to be. 

I rate the film Eenie Meanie

GOOD

I watched Eenie Meanie on HBO.