Paper Tiger | Dir. James Grey | ★★★★☆

After directing a film about British explorer Percy Fawcett as he searched for an ancient civilisation in the Amazon rainforest; a psychological sci-fi drama film about a sad astronaut; and a coming of age drama starring Anne Hathaway, the next logical step for James Gray was always going to be a New York City gangster movie.

This enigmatic director once again brings together an enviable cast, with Miles Teller and Adam Driver playing Jewish brothers Irwin and Gary Pearl as they navigate a sepia-tinged 1980s New York, with Scarlett Johansson thrown in for good measure as Irwin’s wife Linda.

Irwin is the archetypal blue-collar worker, still a little in thrall to his retired cop brother despite them being grown men. So when Gary arrives at Irwin’s family home bearing both gifts and a too-good-to-be-true business opportunity, Irwin jumps at the chance. The opportunity: helping a bunch of fresh-off-the-boat Russians with their oil disposal business in the dilapidated Brooklyn docks. What could go wrong?

Implausibly naive, Irwin decides on a whim to visit the site at night with his two kids, despite this being 1980s New York City. This makes the Russians, each of whom are terrifying in both appearance and manner, very cross indeed and the rest of the movie follows the brothers as they attempt to escape from the snare of these terrifying gangsters, the noose tightening at every turn. 

While Gray is clearly fascinated by the way the wave of Russian immigrants changed the rules of organised crime in New York, Paper Tiger is at its heart a family drama. The Pearl brothers are both rivals and co-dependents; both, in their way, have it all, yet they are willing to risk everything for a chance to get rich quick. The American Dream, baby! And it’s Linda who’s inevitably left to make the hard decisions, despite having problems of her own.

Paper Tiger fails to stick the landing

The three leads are predictably brilliant and the pacing for the first 90 minutes is propulsive. There’s a sense of inevitability as these characters rattle towards their fates to the sound of ticking clocks and thumping machinery. And with the grainy, grimy cinematography, they all look wonderfully chic as they do so. It’s strange, then, that Gray’s ending feels borrowed from any number of made-for-TV cop dramas, the final scenes visually stunning but narratively flat, resorting to cliche when the rest of Paper Tiger aims much higher.

As it stands, Paper Tiger is a well acted crime thriller but one that falls tantalisingly short of the greatness that lies just a paper’s breadth away.