I Care A Lot. Quick Review.

A Golden Globe-winning Rosamund Pike is fantastic in this darkly comedic satire. She plays a con woman who runs an organisation preying on vulnerable people. Getting them installed under her legal guardianship and then fleeing them for all they are worth. It’s a shame that the rest of the film can’t live up to the strength of Pikes performance. Things immediately suffer from a very poorly paced opening act that takes far too long to set up all the narrative domino’s that enable the plot to get going. Dianne Wiest and Peter Dinklage are introduced as a potential victim and a mysterious figure that may be too good to fall for one of Pike’s schemes. At around the half-hour mark for the next 25 minutes tonally the film establishes itself as a potentially terrific contemporary thriller. At a certain point after this stretch is complete things take a very hard pivot as part of a development that carries the narrative across the finish line. This genre diversion might be more successful than the opening act in that it’s better paced. It has enough momentum to engage the audience in wanting to see the storey reach an outcome. on the other hand, this storey shift means things enter the realm of the silly and borderline fantastical rather quickly. This doesn’t sit effectively with what started as a very credible attempt at satire ( even if it did not entirely work.) This results in a very frustrating final product that possesses a fantastic central performance and is terrific in patches. Viewers mileage may vary depending on how much they buy into the films various twists and turns. The direction in powering the second half of the film to a conclusion has greater narrative momentum then a very lacklustre opening act it’s nowhere near as effective as the film at its best. This is one of those pieces of media where whether strengths it possesses or enough to knock it into a moderately tentative recommendation but even men it comes with several massive qualifications. Once the credits rolled this viewer simply wished the film as a whole had delivered something worthy of Pikes central performance.
6/10.