Eye For Film >> Movies >> Paper Tiger (2026) Film Review
There's nothing weong with aiming for a retro vibe with a film, as James Grey does with Paper Tiger, which is set in Eighties New York. The issue is that if you strip out the elevated craft and A-list performances, what is left is the sort of bread-and-butter plot arc Cagney & Lacey used to rely on back in the day.
In fact, the home life of crime fighter Mary Beth Lacey could be the template for Scarlett Johansen's housewife Esther. She lives in Queens, with her earnest but less than dynamic engineer husband Irwin (Miles Teller peering out from behind giant spectacles) and their two sons Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Benjamin (Roman Engel). Before long Esther will get a subplot of her own that is what I would call “soap opera convenient”, turning up at just the right moment to act as a catalyst.
Irwin’s brother Gary (Adam Driver), a slick former cop with a host of business ideas, is a regular visitor to their home. Divorced bit moneyed thanks to successful business dealings, good latest plan is to use Irwin's engineering background to set up a consultancy firm offering assessments for Russian businesses who have a contract to clean-up by the environmental dumping ground that is the Gowanus canal.
Unsurprisingly, things do not go to plan and an innocuous visit by Gary puts his family in the sights of mobsters looking for payback.
The performances are engaging, from Johannson, trying to hold herself together in the face of family and personal crises, to Teller as a man increasingly out of his depth and Driver as the brother discovering neither his patter or connections are as impressive as he thought, but these are stock characters. The sincere guy – those spectacles are a tell – led into trouble by his cocky brother; the Russians template cutouts of 1000 violent henchmen who have flicked knives before.
Grey gets decent mileage from the family interplay, helped by lived-in production design from Happy Massee, who creates a textured home in shades of beige. A climactic set piece also delivers tension but this idea of strivers facing tragedy has little to distinguish it from thousands of similar crime tales.
Reviewed on: 18 May 2026
