{"id":488517,"date":"2026-05-17T01:07:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T01:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/488517\/"},"modified":"2026-05-17T01:07:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T01:07:12","slug":"paper-tiger-review-miles-teller-adam-driver-ensnared-by-russian-mob","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/488517\/","title":{"rendered":"Paper Tiger Review: Miles Teller, Adam Driver Ensnared by Russian Mob"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJames Gray has always been an intensely personal filmmaker, but his last movie, \u201cArmageddon Time\u201d (2022), took a turn into the explicitly autobiographical \u2014 it was all about his experience growing up in dowdy middle-class Queens in the early \u201980s, a setting that allowed Gray to take forays into themes of race and pop culture and the shadow of Donald Trump (whose imperious father was a character in the movie). So it\u2019s a bit of a surprise to see Gray, in \u201cPaper Tiger<\/a>,\u201d return to more or less that same setting and a comparable atmosphere of mouthy, close-knit Jewish domestic psychodrama. \u201cPaper Tiger\u201d is like a spiritual sequel to \u201cArmageddon Time.\u201d The difference is that the new movie has the dread-fueled engine of a neo-New Hollywood v\u00e9rit\u00e9 thriller.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPaper Tiger\u201d is set in the late \u201980s, which means that it\u2019s even more ramped up with material anxiety. And whereas the father in \u201cArmageddon Time,\u201d brilliantly played by Jeremy Strong, was a dweeb sitting on a keg of anger, in the new movie the father, Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller<\/a>), is an earnest reservoir engineer who\u2019s as sweet and passive and trusting as he looks. The movie is about how Irwin and his brother, a high-rolling ex-cop named Gary (Adam Driver<\/a>), get involved in a financial scheme that ensnares them in the tentacles of the Russian mob.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cArmageddon Time\u201d was beautifully directed around the edges, but too anecdotal \u2014 and too message-y about its racial themes \u2014 to add up to something greater than the sum of its reminiscences. If anything, Gray\u2019s direction has now grown even more supple and confident \u2014 he\u2019s a master of simmering-under-the-surface family trauma \u2014 and \u201cPaper Tiger,\u201d for a while, feels like it\u2019s going to be the contemporary answer to a Sidney Lumet film.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Pearls, with two close but squabbling sons, one of whom is about to apply to college, and a mom, Hester (Scarlett Johannson, nailing the outer-borough bluntness), who keeps everyone in check, are a relatively solid unit, but they\u2019re poorer than the family in the last film, and you can see how their ragtag financial situation eats away at them. The boys feel like their stuff is cheap and junky. And can Scott (Gavid Goudey) afford to go to an Ivy League school, which is Irwin\u2019s dream for him? That aspiration, common as it may be, is in this case a coded form of assimilation anxiety \u2014 Irwin wants his sons to leap over the restrictions he faced as a mid-century Jewish striver.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s where Gary, with his flimflam charisma, comes in. One night he arrives at the Pearls\u2019 home for dinner, bringing takeout from Peter Luger (the fabled steakhouse in Williamsburg), which is kind of outrageous. (It\u2019s generous; it\u2019s also an emotional bribe.) Later that night, he takes Irwin aside and lays out his plan. It seems that the powers that be in New York City have finally agreed to clean up the Gowanus Canal, the 1.8-mile stretch in Brooklyn that is one of the most famously polluted bodies of water in the U.S. Gary proposes that he and Irwin launch a company to get in on the elaborate logistics of the clean-up, all guided by Irwin\u2019s expertise as an engineer. The potential to make a killing is there. The one stipulation, explains Gary, is that they\u2019ll have to work with the recently arrived wave of Russian immigrants who\u2019ve attached their livelihoods to the workings of the canal.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt all sounds feasible, or maybe too good to be true. When Irwin and Gary go down to have a meeting with Vesselinov (Alexei Yunov), who is speaking for the Russians, he has an aura of slick-haired threat, and he doesn\u2019t seem exactly grateful to see them. Nevertheless, James Gray pulls us into rooting for this sidelong American dream. That is, until Irwin, on a whim, takes his two boys down to the canal one night to show them what their dad is planning.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe sees something he\u2019s not supposed to: barrels of oil being dumped. One of the Russians demands that Irwin go into the office, where they sit him in a chair and punch him in the face. Meanwhile, another Russian \u2014 this one bald and sinister \u2014 goes into the car where the two boys are waiting, takes out a stiletto that looks sharp enough to slice an elephant\u2019s hide, and holds it right up to one of the boy\u2019s faces.<\/p>\n

\n\tDoes that sound like a scary scene? It\u2019s actually shockingly scary. Yet I was even more shocked by the prospect of it popping up so early in the movie. \u201cPaper Tiger\u201d sets itself up as the kind of drama where a decent and ordinary man, in this case Irwin, gets sucked into a scheme he\u2019s too na\u00efve to realize is criminal, and by the time he wakes up he\u2019s trapped. But the moment this cataclysm occurs, laying bare the vicious hooligans Irwin and Gary are \u201cworking\u201d with, there\u2019s only thing a man like Irwin would say: I want out. Not just because he\u2019s not a criminal, but because he\u2019d want to protect his family. He\u2019d cut those ties as quickly as humanly possible.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut that\u2019s not what happens. Despite the fact that the Russian held a knife up to his teenage son\u2019s face, Irwin, under the thrall of his brother (or, at least, that\u2019s the idea), goes forward with the plan, agreeing to a sit-down with Gary and the Russian Mr. Big, Semion Bogoyavich (Victor Ptak), who informs them that due to Irwin\u2019s \u201ctransgression,\u201d they now owe the Russians $150,000. And things just spiral down from there. Gary, oozing with ambition and bravado, explains to Irwin that the Russian are a \u201cpaper tiger\u201d \u2014 that is, a lot less harmful than they look. This is clearly an important piece of dialogue, since it\u2019s the title of the movie. Yet it\u2019s also preposterous. How could anyone think these Russian mobsters are a paper tiger, when what they look like is a tiger that\u2019s about to tear your head off?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s Gary\u2019s reckless greed that powers the plot. Yet for all of Adam Driver\u2019s moxie, the character never entirely gels. He\u2019s a former superstar cop who worked clean\u2026and is still wired into the police force\u2026and has a lot of money\u2026yet seems weirdly na\u00efve about the Russian mob\u2026except that he\u2019s also a badass who isn\u2019t scared to stand up to them\u2026so maybe he\u2019s just happy to get rich in the underworld\u2026or not\u2026because it\u2019s never clear. You can feel James Gray wanting to will something like a Lumet version of Greek tragedy into the tale of these two brothers, and of Irwin\u2019s blind loyalty to Gary\u2019s huckster-psycho moves. But even the scene-to-scene skill of Gray\u2019s direction can\u2019t stop the movie from turning into a mixture of the grandiose and the implausible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPaper Tiger\u201d certainly establishes a vivid sense of middle-class terror, sort of like an \u201980s-mob version of \u201cCape Fear,\u201d when the Russians spook Irwin by breaking into his home, rearranging the furniture and photographing his family members asleep. Yet the film keeps tripping itself up. At one point, the Russian boss tells Gary that he\u2019s the one they really want to partner with, not Irwin \u2014 so why did they bother terrorizing Irwin? And Gray then layers in a plot about Hester undergoing a severe medical crisis. Johansson certainly makes you feel her pain, but it still plays as one twist too many. \u201cPaper Tiger\u201d adds up on paper, and I suspect that Gray, a longtime critics\u2019 darling, will get some of his best reviews for it. The movie is engineered to be seen as \u201cpowerful.\u201d Right now, though, I\u2019d say that he\u2019s an ace director who\u2019s still being undercut by the holes in his screenplays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James Gray has always been an intensely personal filmmaker, but his last movie, \u201cArmageddon Time\u201d (2022), took a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[27216,11519,18,117,19,17,42054,327,213153,21008],"class_list":{"0":"post-488517","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-adam-driver","9":"tag-cannes-film-festival","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-miles-teller","15":"tag-movies","16":"tag-paper-tiger","17":"tag-scarlett-johansson"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116587242662877474","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}