By Dan Skip Allen  

James Gray is a director who has made some good films in the past. I particularly liked “Armeggon Time” an autobiographical film that hit me pretty hard, and “The Lost City of Z” a period piece adventure film with some big stars today not as much back when it came out in theaters. He has dealt with a lot of different genres in his career. One he’s touched on a couple of times now is the crime genre. With “We Own the Night”, “The Yards” and now his latest film “Paper Tiger”. Like some of his other movies, it takes place in the 80s, a decade I love dearly. I grew up in the 80s, so stories that take place here are near and dear to my heart. There are a lot of things about “Paper Tiger” that should have been my vibe but weren’t in the end.

Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller) is like a lot of men. He has a good job as an engineer, and he’s a good family man from Queens, New York, specifically Elmhurst. They are also a Jewish family. He has a beautiful wife, Nester (Scarlett Johansson), and two teenage sons, Ben & Scott (Roman Engel, Gavin Goudey). He gets a call one night in 1986 from his brother Gary Pearl (Adam Driver) saying he wants to talk to him and he’s going to bring dinner over for them and the family. After a nice dinner, catered by a fancy restaurant,  Peter Luger’s Steakhouse, they get to talking without the wife and kids in the room. They close the door and Gary tells his brother about a consulting firm he wants to start and their first job would be helping some Russians who have infiltrated the New York area with a plan to clean up the Gowanus Canal that goes for miles in the area. So they can then develop it into a place where people can go with their families, like a park, or shops, and restaurants, and so forth. This seems good at first.

There is an inciting incident in this movie that sets everything in motion regarding the story. The Teller character is so excited by this opportunity that he decides to go down to where he met the Russians and show his boys where he’s going to work and some of what his job will entail. The problem is the Russians didn’t like that and they thought he was some kind of a threat to them so they decided to scare him and his sons enough for them to get the picture that they are not men to be trifled with. In fact, they are dangerous men who are part of the Russian mafia. This doesn’t exactly go well for Teller’s character, but his brother didn’t like what happened either because it makes things more difficult on him and their plan to become business partners with these men. This leads to a dangerous game of Russian roulette to use an analogy. You might not get shot the first time, but there are other times when things can happen that aren’t good for you.

I’m a fan of thrillers and crime movies. There is something about being a criminal or following along with them that excites me. That feeling of being bad is fascinating to me. Gray wants people who see this film to be scared by the dangerous Russian mafia because they threaten this family in their home and make threats towards them while they’re sleeping. To use another apology, there is a lot of bark from this dog but no bite. Gray tries to make things suspenseful and dangerous for this family, but I was bored by what I saw. Nothing that the Russians did worried me. There is an obvious conclusion to this movie that I saw coming a mile away, but by the time that happened, I had no interest in watching this movie anymore. There were some things that interested me in the context of the film, but none of them proved to be all that great to me in the end except for one thing.

That is a subplot involving the Johansson character. She is, of course, worried about what is going on with her husband, the father of her sons, but she has a health scare that comes to the forefront as the movie progresses. Her story was interesting to me but was something that had nothing to do with the main story. She did a great job regarding her story and the back and forth with Teller, but in the end, it was something that distracted from a story that wasn’t that good. There really was much depth and storytelling in the film as a whole, so Gray added this subplot to pad out the story and the film. I hate to say it, but this story as a whole was lacking, which made the film not as good as I’d hoped it would be.

The performances from the three main actors were one of the reasons why I wanted to see this movie. This trio are some of my favorite working actors today. Teller, Driver, and Johansson are all capable of giving some great performances in their careers. Here they do an adequate job but don’t go to the left level which I’ve seen them do in the past. Teller just comes across as a normal guy, but even that’s who he is. He doesn’t do anything with the character to make him all that interesting. Driver is doing a shtick on a New York guy that I did like because I haven’t seen him do this before. He was pretty funny in his performance, and that’s not exactly what he’s supposed to come across as. He’s supposed to be a tough ex-New York cop turned security consultant. Now, Johansson uses props like hair curlers and glasses to become this New York wife and mother. She had the accent and everything. She’s played a New Yorker before, so I’m pretty sure it was easy for her to slip back into that accent. This entire cast was just fine, not great, or anything.

“Paper Tiger” is a movie that resembles its title in more ways than one. It wants to be this big bad crime thriller, but it’s not. It’s a small example of what it wants to be. Gray doesn’t infuse enough into the script to become something more than a two hour episode of a generic procedural on a random network cable television station. The actors do the best job they can given the bad script they have to work with. Teller, Driver, and Johansson are just fine in their roles. The crime aspects I was looking forward to are nonexistent. There are a couple of okay moments, but nothing at the level this film is trying to be. I’m sorry to say that this movie is like its title, a paper tiger with no roar at all, even though there is a moment where this is a scene that resembles a tiger stalking its prey. That was a moment of creativity that came too late for me.

🌟 🌟 ½ stars