I Care a Lot

It’s pretty much a slam dunk by the halfway point since the central pensioner scam is a believably foul business, the plot unravels slowly and suspensefully, Peter Dinklage has a great accent and charisma, and Rosamund Pike successfully makes progress in her acting struggle not to come across as a living being. Plus, it has an interesting unspoken subplot at the start about there being a skeleton crew of women in executive positions across the system who look out each other and watch each other's backs in various types of semi-legal trouble. Once the cards are laid on the table, it knocks itself down a few times, stops making sense, and starts peppering us with one tendentious cliché after another. In bullet points (spoilers): 1) the film outright states several times that this will be a conflict of different ways of solving problems, i.e. the fear and brutal violence the mafia antagonist works with versus the cunning and outwitting of the system within it, which is the protagonist's domain. In the end, however, she achieves victory by electrifying the antagonist's security guard with tasers and then drugging him and leaving him dumped in the woods, thus achieving victory over him by his own means, in exact opposition to what she has convinced us of so far 2) Rosamund Pike's character here comes across as a clichéd Strong Woman (TM). To support her, the film thus puts her in situations where a dirty redneck in a red baseball cap threatens to rape her. I find this translation of the Twitter mindset into the medium of film extremely annoying 3) the film is shot in such a way that it could take place practically anywhere there are a few houses, as the camera doesn't take up any space at all and we mostly watch static focused faces in a narrow focus strip with a completely blurred background. Most of the semi-closeups and closeups of faces look like something out of a corporate annual report. 4) When the film does dare to go all in with everything and familiarize us with the space where the scene takes place, for some reason some places are completely nonsensically lit in purple or red, for example, and there's a turquoise light shining out of the windows of a normal apartment building that no one really shines at home. This isn't the first contemporary film where I've seen this, and I'd like someone to explain why they’re doing this to me. (28/02/2021)

The opening monologue appealed to my cynical side, so I was looking forward to a movie that would be right up my alley. At first, it seemed that way. But the filmmakers obviously overestimated their abilities. As time went on, some things stopped making sense and the story started clashing with logic, and the ending was downright pathetic. Despite all my reservations, I'm giving a slightly above-average rating for the very good first half. (09/05/2021)

I don't really like it when a professional killer in a film decides to kill someone professionally, he does it craftily and cunningly, but then he fails to completely professionally convince himself that he actually did it. This scene, along with one final plan, which was probably successful only thanks to a happy coincidence, lost the film one star from my review. Otherwise, I surprisingly had fun, especially thanks to the perfect Rosamund Pike. (07/03/2021)

Of course, I'm glad it turned out the way it did .... but had it ended a few minutes earlier, I would’ve tipped my proverbial hat because a film with such big cynical balls would be remembered years from now. Blakeson just went soft, but it doesn’t matter, my idealistic little soul was relieved, so at least I send my kisses to Rosamund, those mischievously ironic pursed lips of hers at exactly the right moment, that eye play, it was an acting recital. (26/02/2021)

An excellent, cynical, motherfucking thriller about the conflict between two assholes. Rosamund Pike enjoys herself plenty playing a despicable being who abuses defenceless old people, until one day she messes with an old woman who has very dangerous friends. It’s brisk, with excellent performances and a lot of fun, but unfortunately not so well written. In the last act things go a bit too over-the-top and the script begins to rely too much on unlikely coincidences. But I’m willing to turn a blind eye to it, because the ending was pleasant. In short, great satisfaction. (19/02/2021)