Wednesday 15 May 2024

I Care a Lot (J Blakeson, 2020)


Rosamund Pike plays a con artist who exploits the legal system to give her control of the assets and very lives of elderly people, getting them confined in a retirement home on the grounds of dementia while she hoovers through their earthly wealth. This all goes swimmingly until she makes the mistake of committing the mother of a drug baron to the facility.
So far, so Better Call Saul, but Pike's character is a far colder fish without a streak of morality and therein lies the rub: there is no sympathetic protagonist at all, with even Peter Dinklage's crime boss, who tries to bring her down, at least having some element of human motivation. But it gets by on the sharpness of the scenes between the adversaries and convincingly painting the American justice system that can allow such injustices to thrive as the real villain of the piece. Once that's covered, however, it descends into a more conventional thriller mode and somewhat runs out of narrative puff. Still, some marks for creating unusual monsters who could credibly be out there, and surely are.

6/10


No comments: