Producers: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick and Marty Ewing   Director: Shawn Simmons   Screenplay: Shawn Simmons   Cast: Samara Weaving, Karl Glusman, Jermaine Fowler, Marshawn Lynch, Steve Zahn, Andy Garcia, Randall Park, Elle Graham, Mike O’Malley, Kyanna Simone, Chelsey Crisp, Phuong Kubacki and Chris Bauer   Distributor: 20^th Century Studios/Hulu

Grade:  C

Shawn Simmons’ debut feature is a bit schizophrenic.  On the one hand, it aims to replicate the beats of a grindhouse fast-car heist movie.  On the other it wants to depict, in serious tones, a young woman’s efforts to mold a better future for herself while remaining true to a man from her troubled past whom she still loves.  “Eenie Meanie” achieves each goal fairly well on its own, but fails to smoothly meld the two.  It also tries to be funny, a decision that further disrupts the tone.

The movie starts with a prologue set in 2007 Cleveland, when young Edie (Elle Graham) is summoned by her father (Steve Zahn) to drive him and her mother (Chelsey Crisp) home from a bar.  When they’re stopped by the cops, her dad instructs her to outrun them as he’s taught her to do; she takes off and the getaway is successful.

Cut to fourteen years later, which would put things in 2021, though there’s curiously no indication that COVID-19 has shut society down.  (How soon we, or at least Simmons and his crew, have forgotten.)  Edie (now Samara Weaving) is working as a bank teller while spending her evenings partying with BFF Baby Girl (Kyanna Simone).  During a robbery her eyes are injured, and during a medical exam she learns she’s pregnant.

That takes her to her troubled boyfriend John (Karl Glusman), whom she finds being beaten up by a couple of thugs trying to collect a debt.  She helps him escape, and he tells her that he owes three million bucks to their former boss Nico (Andy Garcia), who offers them a deal: he’ll cancel the debt if they’ll heist the prize money at a poker competition being held in a glitzy casino.  The cash is kept in a muscle car that’s the centerpiece of an exhibit at the place, so all they need do is steal it.  With no alternative, they reluctantly agree; the job will be overseen by a fellow Nico trusts known as The Chaperone (Jermaine Fowler).

Despite interference from Nico’s current go-to driver Perm (Marshawn Lynch) and his girlfriend (Phuong Kubacki), they pull off the job.  Unfortunately, screw-up John has one more bad move up his sleeve.

There are plenty of car chases and crashes in “Eenie Meanie,” and even if they’re pretty familiar they’re nicely staged and executed thanks to the efforts of Simmons, cinematographer Tim Ives and editors Dirk Westervelt and Chris Patterson, the visuals naturally pumped up by Bobby Krlic’s thundering score.  As for the more dramatic elements of the picture—like a heart-to-heart Edie has with The Chaperone about why she’s so devoted to John, or a visit she makes to her now wheelchair-bound father and his new suburban family—Weaving, Fowler and Zahn handle them well enough, but they come across as rather sappy intrusions on the heist scenario.  Garcia’s contributions to the latter amount to the sort of coolly sinister stuff he can deliver in his sleep, which is what he seems to be doing here; Glusman plays the not-so-lovable loser adequately, though despite her heartfelt speech it’s difficult to see why Edie puts up with him.

The incongruous humor is mostly in the form of limp banter between Edie and John, but there’s one brief episode in which Randall Park has a droll cameo as a former partner of John’s who ends up very much the worse for wear.  Lynch’s turn is intended to be funny too, though it’s mostly irritating, and like Park’s ends gruesomely.

There are incidental moments in “Eenie Meanie” that register, and if you’re an aficionado of extended car chases or silly heist movies, it might pass muster.  But its tonally jarring elements never coalesce into a satisfying whole, and you’re likely to click it off feeling rather depressed by the whole business.

Producers: Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, John Fischer, Isaac Klausner and Adrián Guerra   Director: Lasse Hallström   Screenplay: Vera Herbert and Les Bohem   Cast: Madelyn Cline, KJ Apa, Sofia Wylie, Madison Thompson, Josh Lucas, Orlando Norman and Marilyn Cutts   Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios

Grade:  C

Some stunning Spanish locations, beautifully shot by cinematographer Elías M. Félix, and two amiable leads in Madelyn Cline and KJ Apa, aren’t enough to save the soapy tale of young love director Lasse Hallström and screenwriters Vera Herbert and Les Bohem have derived from the 2017 novel by the prolific J.P. Monninger, whose books have some of the same appeal as Nicholas Sparks’ and John Green’s.  “The Map That Leads to You” is a pretty, emotionally manipulative and in the end shallow romance cast in the form of a European road trip.

The tripper is Heather Mulgrew (Cline), on a jaunt to the continent along with her college pals Connie (Sofia Wylie) and Amy (Madison Thompson)—a post-graduation breathing space before taking on jobs in the real world.  Heather’s the organized one, pushing her companions to breathlessly board the train to Barcelona just as it’s about to depart. Having found a seat, she’s introduced to Jack (Apa), a gregarious New Zealander.  It’s a “cute” meeting, of course—she’s somewhat discomfited when he climbs onto the luggage rack above her to stay cool and rest.  But they’re soon talking agreeably (over the fact that they’re both reading “The Sun Also Rises,” for instance), and by the time they disembark their flirtation has turned serious.

Jack, however, has arranged his trip not around tour guides but a journal kept by his grandfather, a World War II soldier who’d wandered the continent after the conflict’s end; he’s following in the footsteps of a beloved ancestor who, if the journal is any indication, was of a deeply poetic bent of mind.  When the two bump into one another again serendipitously at a club, fate seems to have taken a hand.  And when Amy, already nursing a broken heart, is robbed of her jacket and passport, Jack leads the girls, and helpful Raef (Orlando Norman), in tracking down the culprit and getting the stuff back—taking the opportunity to pocket a wad of cash they find in the crook’s apartment, which allows for more extravagant frolicking.  

When the time comes for Heather to go back to the States with Connie and Amy, Jack persuades her to stay, and after assuring her concerned but supportive dad (Josh Lucas, literally phoning it in) that she knows what she’d doing, she remains with him.  The plan is that following a final fling in Europe—which includes a visit with a colorful family his grandfather had gotten to know during his travels—Jack will come to America with her.  But a complication arises when he’s injured running with the bulls in Pamplona and a sad secret from his past, revealed by the medical treatment he receives, leads him to disappoint her.  Naturally that’s not the end of the relationship, however, with the journal providing the clue that brings about a bittersweet reunion.

The ensemble cast do everything they can to put across this saccharine Hallmark-quality sap, with Wylie, Thompson and Norman all pleasant enough as the friends who remain unfailingly supportive despite having troubles of their own.  But it’s Cline and Apa who hold center stage, and they make an attractive pair, with her struggling over what’s more important to her, Jack or the job she’s supposed to go back to, and him finally able to use his New Zealand accent after spending years compelled to affect an American one as Archie Andrews and in a succession of mediocre movies.  These are characters so hopelessly infatuated with other another from the moment they meet that you know the single moment that they argue—he criticizes tourists for taking selfies instead of emotionally embracing their surroundings, and she lambastes his pomposity—will pass away like the summer breeze.

Yet those who enjoy this sort of thing will probably find this “Map” worth following to the end despite its utter predictability.  The locations are as lovely as the couple enthralled by them, and are beautifully photographed; Isona Rigau’s production design complements them; editors Brad Turner and Douglas Crise insert plenty of “aren’t we having fun?” montages into the mix; and Sarah Trevino’s score supplies the necessary tones of exuberance and/or sadness.

In his earlier, better days Hallström tried to insert some depth into his movies; here, as in his more recent work, he’s content to get by with easygoing surface gloss and heart-on-sleeve emotion.  For some that will be enough.