Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “EM3: Eenie Meenie Miney Moe” Tells An All-Too-Familiar Story

em3 2:star: :star:

Raul, a tow truck driver in Miami Beach, learns that every choice has its rewards and consequences.

In 1992, David Fincher made his first movie which was “Alien 3”. Many people at the time, and even today, dislike it the most out of all the Alien films and the reason is simple. When Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) crashlands on a strange, distant planet in the beginning of the movie, we find out that the facility she comes to inhabit, is a prison for some of earth’s nastiest convicts. Between them all, there are murderers and rapists and pedophiles so when the alien finally surfaces and starts offing them one by one, we don’t care about them because of who they are. We actually start rooting for the alien and that’s where the film failed, by introducing despicable, horrible characters and then asking us to care about them. Well, the same can be said for the characters in “EM3: Eenie Meenie Miney Moe”, a drama set in sunny Miami.

We have drug dealers, junkies, underage sex, chop chops and illegal towing companies. Raul (Andres Dominguez) is a tow-truck driver who prowls the streets of Miami after dark and picks the most expensive-looking cars so he can tow them back to the garage where he then enjoys a cut of the profits. Before he delivers any vehicle though, he searches the car and anything inside is fair game: money, jewelry, drugs, gifts, guns, nothing is off-limits. He meets Nikki (Belkys Galvez) and they fall in love. She dreams of moving to the beach and he wants nothing more than to make her happy. One night however, before he brings a car into the garage, he finds two bags of ecstasy inside and sells the narcotics to a friend who runs a night club. Shortly thereafter, people start dying because the pills were part of a bad batch.

The diverse multitude of characters we meet throughout the film, hookers, drug pushers, dopeheads, thieves, none of them seem to have any morals and only care about themselves and like the introductory comments I made about the prisoners in “Alien 3”, the same situation arises here. We cut from the many different characters as they lay dying from the bad drugs, regurgitating their guts up and suffering a very slow and painful death but we really don’t care about them. Most of them, from what we see and are told, never cared about anybody or anything their entire lives other than themselves and those few who did, their conversion comes a little too late. Raul and Nikki plan on getting away from all the badness in their lives to start afresh, but when retribution comes for them, their good intentions are not enough to save them.

Raul constantly does bad things in his life, selling drugs, stealing people’s cars and their personal belongings and it doesn’t matter that they might have money or are obviously wealthy, their personal things are still theirs but Raul doesn’t care, he’s only in it for financial gain. When Nikki enters his life, he falls head over heels for her but still, he doesn’t change his ways. It’s only when he is trying to rush her to the hospital as she is dying, that he talks about becoming a better man but clearly we can see it’s nothing more than a last-minute desperate plea to keep her alive. I wanted to feel for him, I wanted to feel for so many of them but the film wouldn’t let me, it had already pre-determined their destinies from the opening shot. There were strong performances throughout and visually, while the film had a polished visage, in the end, good-looking wasn’t enough to save the story and most of the characters that, in my opinion, weren’t worth saving.

At Redbox now and on DVD June 17th

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James McDonald

Originally from Dublin, Ireland, James is a Movie Critic with 40 years of experience in the film industry as an Award-Winning Filmmaker. He is also a member of the Critics Choice Association and the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association.