Genre Action

Eenie Meanie (2025)

Item: Eenie Meanie
Rating: 1.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★½ — Eenie Meanie (2025)

What a waste. That's the first thing I thought as the credits rolled on Eenie Meanie, and it's the thought I keep coming back to. Not anger, not confusion, just a dull, heavy disappointment. Because Samara Weaving is genuinely talented. She's proved it elsewhere. And here she's been handed absolutely nothing and asked to make something of it.

I'll be honest about what I went in expecting. The title, the vague marketing, the loose suggestion of a chase thriller. I thought this might be something gloriously trashy and propulsive. A bit pulpy, a bit dumb, maybe wildly entertaining in the way that films which don't take themselves too seriously can be. Think something in the spirit of what I loved about Mad Max: Fury Road, stripped right back. Low budget, high energy, just get on with it. That would have been fine. That would have been fun. Instead, Eenie Meanie is a lifeless, poorly written slog that mistakes inertia for tension and mistakes gloom for grit.

Nothing happens. That's not me being reductive. I mean that in long, painful stretches of this film, genuinely nothing of consequence occurs. The pacing is atrocious. The story pretends to be building toward something, tries on the costume of a tense thriller, but the tension never arrives. The stakes never feel real. There's no momentum pulling you through the scenes, just a slow drift from one underwritten moment to the next. When the action does eventually show up, it's underlit, badly choreographed, and over so quickly you'd be forgiven for thinking you imagined it. There's no style to any of it, no craft, no sense that anyone behind the camera was genuinely excited about what they were making.

And then there's Weaving. I genuinely hate saying this, because I want to root for her. But she can't carry this. Her delivery is flat throughout, her emotional beats don't land, and the character she's been given is so thinly written, all clichéd lines and zero arc, that it's hard to know if even a great performance could have saved it. She seems lost. Like she turned up, found no map, and had to just wander through the thing hoping something clicked. It never does. I don't blame her, not entirely. The writing gives her nothing to grip. But the fact remains that the film rests on her shoulders and the whole thing buckles.

The whole production has that particular straight-to-VOD feeling, the one where you can tell a small amount of money was scraped together, a recognisable name was attached to get the thing across the line, and then the corners were cut everywhere else. Except Eenie Meanie apparently managed some sort of minor theatrical release, which is genuinely baffling. There are films made for a fraction of this budget that have more energy, more wit, more reason to exist.

I think about something like Hardcore Henry, a film that knew exactly what it was and committed to it completely, for better or worse. Eenie Meanie doesn't know what it is. It's chasing a genre identity it never earns and a tone it never finds. That uncertainty bleeds into every scene. Is it a character study? A thriller? A chase film? It's none of them. It's a shrug dressed up as a movie.

One and a half stars. Avoid unless the alternative is staring at the back of an aeroplane seat for two hours with the entertainment system broken. And even then, have a think about it.

Rating: ★½ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2025-09-08

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Hulu
Physical: Amazon US

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