The immensely talented Samara Weaving plays a highly skilled underworld driver trying to turn her life around in the wildly uneven “Eenie Meanie”, a Hulu exclusive and the first feature from writer-director Shawn Simmons. “Eenie Meanie” aims to be the kind of gritty pulp that Quentin Tarantino fans might happily embrace. Sadly, neither its style or its story comes close to the films or filmmakers that inspired it.

“Eenie Meanie” often feels at war with itself. There are flashes of originality that occasionally make its way to the surface. But even at 94 minutes, the cliché riddled story quickly sputters while the uninteresting (and often annoying) characters give us no one to latch onto. Making things worse, the film’s tonal confusion gets more noticeable the further we go, as the far-fetched silliness attempts to segue into something that could have been emotionally impactful if not for everything that came before it.

Weaving plays Edie Meaney who was given her titular nickname by a low-level crime boss named Nico (Andy Garcia). We learn Nico shamelessly used Edie on jobs dating back to when she was 15-years-old. He took an almost fatherly liking to her, going as far as doing something unheard of in gangland – giving her a ticket out. As a result, Edie is doing everything she can to go clean including working a legitimate job to help pay her way through college.

But things change in a snap with the introduction of her impulsive and perpetual loser ex-boyfriend John (Karl Glusman). He’s the kind of guy who is always screwing up and needing other people to bail him out. He’s also the type of character who is insufferable to watch on screen. It’s certainly not the fault of Glusman who does exactly what the script asks. But a little of John goes a long way, and unfortunately he’s gets plenty of screen time.

John’s latest debacle comes after he kidnaps a valuable casino card counter named Leo (Randall Park) who is working for Nico. John lures in an unaware Edie to help him get away from Nico’s goons, but when Leo is killed during the escape, Edie finds herself pulled into John’s latest mess. She insists they go to Nico and explain what happened. While her former boss is willing to let her go, the only way he will let John live is if the two of them carry out a heist. $3 million in winnings from a high-end poker tournament to be precise. Of course Edie is guilted into agreeing.

From there the story only gets more predictable. But that’s hardly its biggest problem. The issues mostly come from the scattershot story. The opening 30 minutes are hardest to bear as it mostly consists of obnoxious people screaming profanities at each other. There’s also this strange plot thread where Edie finds out she’s pregnant. It’s a detail which should have carried a lot more weight than it ever does. There’s also a wedged-in backstory meant to earn our sympathy but that is terribly underdeveloped. And through it all, several wasted side characters pop in but have little effect.

Weaving is the film’s big saving grace. While she sometimes seems a bit bored with what she’s given, she does bring some much-needed life, and later on heart, to a movie that has a hard time sustaining either. But its all so messily thrown together and it never coalesces into much of anything. It tries hard in the final act. But the result is an unearned finish that even Weaving can’t make us fully buy into. “Eenie Meanie” is now streaming exclusively on Hulu.

VERDICT – 2 STARS