I CARE A LOT

 

We all get old. That's a simple fact of life for the lucky. As you get older, things start being taken from you. At first it starts small. Your knees start to ache when it rains. Later on you start noticing you've got more than a couple of gray hairs in places you'd rather not talk about at parties. Then one day you walk into a room and you're frozen with bewilderment wondering what your reasoning was for leaving your favorite spot on the couch. In the long run time may take a little from us. That's just life, but happens when we run afoul of men and women who are out to take the rest of what we have in our golden years? Such is the case with the new Netflix movie I Care A Lot. 

 

In this movie, Rosamund Pike plays a crooked legal guardian, a sort of modern day Cruella de Vil of the elderly who makes a lavish living stealing the wealth and possessions of senior citizens under a bevy of legalease and false pretenses. She meets her match however, when she runs into a cold-as-ice Russian mobster in Peter Dinklage when she unknowingly tries to cheat his mother (Dianne West) out of her estate. This black blackety-black black comedy of sorts quickly turns into a compelling show of who can do the most detestable thing to the other and get away with it.

The movie is all aces from a technical standpoint. It's exceptionally well shot and well acted and some of the action scenes in this are fraught with tension. It’s got a very interesting quality about it in that it’s a film without a real protagonist so literally anything is fair game as we watch two absolutely monstrous people duke it out for superiority. To me though, this movie struggles to strike the correct balance in tone as it tap-dances so freely around and on some pretty despicably grounded and real behavior. It was also hard to fall in with the film's supposed protagonist Pike, as her charicter is so immediately thoroughly unlikable throughout the film. So much so that when the movie ultimately asks you to take her side in the end, it gets a resounding “eff you” from me.

 

Problems aside, I liked the movie and was always entertained and kept on the edge of my seat waiting for Rosamund Pike to get what was coming to her. I Care A Lot gets a 2.5...out of 5.