I Care a Lot

Rosamund Pike plays your typical, ruthless, evil, confident bitch who literally gets away with everything. The film has a compelling story about a woman who steals from defenseless pensioners and always gets away with it, until she runs into a lady who has dangerous friends. In addition to Rosamund Pike’s great performance, there is an excellent antagonist in Peter Dinklage (known to most as Tyrion). It’s nicely and engagingly shot, it has style, swing and panache, and plenty of twists and turns are not spared and suspense. I certainly wasn't expecting such an entertaining, engaging and intelligent film. Netflix is on. Story****, Action>No, Humor** Violence**, Funniness****, Music***, Visuals****, Atmosphere****, Suspense***. 7.5/10: (02/19/2021)

This is my Promising Adult Woman! Original subject matter with modern definition of the characters, a clever battle of rock-solid egos, where no one is an angel and everyone deserves a punch in the mouth. A thriller and a gangster film, led by a female character as masterfully as Clint Eastwood did in Leone’s westerns and, at the same time, an accurate mirror held up to American society. Rosamund Pike hands in the best performance by an actress in an English-language film in recent memory – not with award-winning depth, but by bejewelling every scene with surgically precise facial expressions. She is the backbone of this boldly conceived mix of genre elements. The casting of Peter Dinklage seems bizarre at first, but gradually fits perfectly into the caricaturish concept of the film. I Care a Lot could have come off as a cheap novelty, but thanks to great directing and Pike, it turned out to be a little post-modern gem. (02/22/2021)

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. (03/07/2021)

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. (02/28/2021)

It hasn’t happened to me in a long time that I've had this much trouble rooting for a character in a movie. Because the problem here is the lack of any "character" in the good sense of the word. Besides, the way the main character justifies his own actions here (lioness or lambs) is insanely banal in every way. Of course I can't say that I don't care how the whole thing turns out and that I wasn't entertained. I Care a Lot combines thriller elements with Coen-esque absurdity quite playfully, and of course tries to put everything into a current social context. Rosamund Pike is OK, though she was a bit more demonic and believable in Gone Girl. In the end, though, it's a pretty cool one-off with a cool story. The ending is a bit overladen and makes a statement more tragicomic than believable on the current status of women in society, but who cares. As long as you don't have exaggerated expectations involving major statements and don't look for any deeper meanings, you'll be reasonably satisfied. It's such a nice play on the genre. [65%] (04/12/2021)