Opening today at a multiplex near us all:
PAPER TIGER (Dir. James Gray, 2026)
It seems that, for the most part, over the course of 10 films, writer/director James Gray has made a career out of turning Queens into a breeding ground for family dysfunction, criminal ambition, and personal ruin. These themes have been apparent in such movies as LITTLE ODESSA, THE YARDS, and especially WE OWN THE NIGHT, and it’s the overriding premise of his newest, PAPER TIGER, in which two brothers in the filmmaker’s old neighborhood (yet again in the ’80s) get entangled with Russian mobsters when trying to land a lucrative business deal involving the cleanup and redevelopment of Brooklyn’s notoriously polluted Gowanus Canal.
Miles Teller and Adam Driver portray the siblings, with Teller as a straight-laced engineer and family man married to Scarlett Johansson, who plays a no-nonsense mother with a thick Brooklyn accent, and Driver as a slick former cop looking for opportunities, regardless of how corrupt they may be. The trouble begins when Teller’s character, Irwin Pearl, takes his sons (Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel) late at night to see the site of what he thinks will be a promising redevelopment deal, only to stumble upon shady AF Russian thugs illegally dumping oil. Irwin’s well-intentioned attempt to alert them to a safety hazard quickly turns into a nightmare, putting him and his sons in the crosshairs of a ruthless criminal outfit.
That’s the chilling through line of this thriller, which has the hallmarks of Gray’s earlier work in its pacing and tight structure, making for a fairly compelling watch, albeit one that sorely lacks oomph. The three leads – Teller, Driver, and Johansson – all perform their roles with a lived-in grace, but there isn’t enough backstory to make their characters feel fully fleshed out. Driver’s dapper, overly confident Gary Pearl is going through a divorce, but it’s merely mentioned and never figures into the story in any meaningful way. Meanwhile, Johansson’s predicament – being told by her doctor that she has a serious illness – never registers with the emotional impact it’s clearly intended to have. Ultimately this film is too clean to be as gritty and impactful as Gray wants it to be.
PAPER TIGER, which, of course, concludes with the expected violence it has been so obviously building toward, is well-crafted and thoroughly engaging – I certainly wasn’t bored during its two-hour running time – but it’s so humorless and lacking in creative spark that I didn’t have much of anything meaningful to take away from it. The film’s strength lies in the three leads’ commitment to the material – Johansson, in particular, adds considerable pathos – but I never really felt invested in or feared for these people.
Gray has contributed some worthy, and at times powerful, cinema – see THE LOST CITY OF Z (which, incidentally, doesn’t involve Queens) – and this is a competent entry that I suspect most folks will enjoy while watching, but one that is unlikely to linger in the memory once the lights come up.
More later...
