I Care a Lot

First let me acknowledge the acting of Rosamund Pike as Marla Grayson. I have never hated a character as much as Marla Grayson. Up there with Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas.

It is only worth watching for Rosamund Pike alone.

Watched 'I Care a Lot' some weeks back with a lot of anticipation. Really like Peter Dinklage and Rosamund Pike as actors, likewise with Dianne Wiest. All three have been fantastic in other things. The premise was a great and interesting one, if very nasty and one that would make anybody unsettled. The film is also in a genre that has always appealed to me and looked great from the advertising. Even the overwhelming negative ratings here didn't dissuade me from seeing 'I Care a Lot'.

After watching, 'I Care a Lot' is to me not near as bad as has been said here and not deserving of so many of the lowest rating votes that indicates no redeeming qualities, which actually goes against what most of those that have given it that rating have said. Having said that, 'I Care a Lot' did disappoint me and certainly wanted to like so much more. It is a film of two halves, one being great and the other being pretty bad. Uneven is a good word to sum it up.

'I Care a Lot' does have a number of good things. The best thing about it is Pike, on killer form as a character that manages to be even more amoral than her Amy Dunne in 'Gone Girl'. She really did make me feel uneasy, just as her role required. Dinklage has never been more sinister than here and his chemistry with Pike in the second half really chills. Eiza Gonzalez has allure and intensity in her acting, her chemistry with Pike sizzles and personally don't think what it represented was laid on too thick. Was also impressed by the always great Wiest, who is moving as the one rootable character in the film.

The visuals are stylish and have an audacious thriller action look, almost looking at times like it was homaging spaghetti westerns. The music is very atmosphere-filled and pulsates with energy without being too over the top. The script in the first half is taut, darkly comic/satiric at times and often chilling, effectively making one feel uncomfortable at the nastiness that goes on. It even has a voice over eerily reminiscent of 'Gone Girl's' "Cool Girl" monologue.

First half is truly great. Fast-paced, intriguing, tense and appropriately makes one feel uncomfortable and scared, this kind of deceit does happen and the film does very well at showing the full horrors of it and how easily it can be fallen for. The direction in the first half was clever stylistically and had the right amount of tension.

Sadly, 'I Care a Lot's' second half is nowhere near as good and actually felt like a different and vastly inferior film. It was mostly pretty bad, and at its worst it was close to awful and saved only by the acting, the chemistry between Pike and Dinklage, their performances and the visuals. The tautness is lost and the intrigue and tension go too and the trashiness goes well overboard. Evident in some truly implausible and very strange moments , and it feels over-stretched (this could have been twenty minutes shorter easily) and downright silly. The murder attempt especially has to be seen to be believed and not in a good way.

Also overkill was the bumbling ineptitude of the mafia, while the dialogue loses its flow and becomes cheesy and self-indulgent. The direction also suffers in quality and became dumb done for the paycheck action thriller-like. While the very end satisfies, what happens comes straight out of nowhere and is rushed through.

Concluding, started off so well but the second half was a real let-down. 6/10.

A movie where you hope the main character fails brutally the entire time.

The main character is unspeakably evil and the writer/director spends the whole movie glorifying her. I've never seen a movie that made me Physically I'll before.

The title of "I Care a Lot" is meant to be ironic, since the woman it's about, a professional ward and guardian for the elderly played by Rosamund Pike, uses her business as a way to bilk vulnerable people out of their assets. But it ended up being doubly ironic, because it also applies to the feelings I had watching it. Everyone in this movie is so vile that I didn't care about any of them.

Except for Dianne Wiest. I did care about her. She plays the mom of a Russian mafia boss and the latest victim of Pike's scheme, the one who sets the plot of the film in motion. Wiest is a sweetheart, and she was no nice to Kevin Bacon in "Footloose," and she has a brief moment where she puts Pike's character in a bad-ass chokehold, which is what I wanted to do to her, that she had me really rooting for her. I also found myself rooting for her son, the mafia boss, played by Peter Dinklage, and that tells you something right there about how morally vacuous this movie is. The Russian Mafia boss is the good guy. Let me repeat that. The Russian Mafia boss is the good guy. Ok, so he cares more about reclaiming some stolen diamonds than he does his stolen mom, but still. The terrible things he's probably done all happen offscreen, so we can pretend that he's basically nice.

Pike clearly has a ball with this role, and it's a huge testament to her abilities as an actress that she could make this movie even as watchable as it is. But I don't know what I was supposed to take away from this film. I felt extremely anxious and shaky watching it. I just wanted really bad things to happen to her and her partner because they're so deplorable. I wanted them to be tortured and killed, because people as awful as they are deserve to be punished for their awfulness. But I felt really bad being made to feel that way, and that's the only thing this movie made me feel.

The movie is pretty poorly written too, but it's so snappy and admittedly entertaining while in the middle of watching it that it's not obvious how poorly it's written until after you've had a chance to mull it over afterwards. I mean seriously, would a Russian Mafia boss (who, by the way, is the good guy, or did I already mention that?) be this inept at killing not one but two women who, no matter how smart and ruthless they might be, still have literally zero experience dealing with Russian Mafia bosses?

Rosamund Pike really needs to jump back into a period gown and do another Jane Austen movie where she gets to be gentle and sweet because otherwise I'm going to be too terrified of her to ever watch her in a movie again.

Grade: B-