User Reviews

This started of great and then half way through just took a turn for the worst. There was so much to go off of with the elder woman and her background, to just let that go and pretend that the guardian is somewhat above every situation like some amazing spy with the ability to supersede all odds. Palease. This could have been great but instead is a disappointing disaster

Rosamunde Pike plays a ruthless caretaker who cons old ladies. That's the start of the story. Quite a promising start, BUT...

The bad: soon into the story, several plot turns were not very credible. And more and more plot turns afterwards became increasingly NOT CREDIBLE AT ALL, to the point that I just couldnt take it seriously any more.

This movie is not meant to be a full on comedy, perhaps it was meant to be a dark kind of humor, but even then there still needs to be some sort of a credibility to the story. Unfortunately there was NONE.

Not any good? The start is good. The acting by Dianne Wiest is excellent. Rosamund Pike however fails at portraying a believable character, because the plot and dialogue are simply completely SILLY and UNBELIEVABLE.

In almost every scene of this movie you will find yourself hating one or two characters. No redeeming qualities for the actors and it starts to get overblown and unbelievable about half way through.

A total butchered story that most will only finish by skipping ahead.

Honestly, what screenwriter wrote this thing and who approved it? How could such a glorious miscalculation of a story ever be put to film?

The film's leads, the two women running the scam, are vile, disgusting, detestable characters. They have absolutely no redeeming qualities. They are not cool, they are not "misunderstood", they are not a parody of anything. They are as likeable as your average international pedophile human trafficker, or con-artist scamming cancer patients out of their money promising fake cures. I found myself hating them more than any other film character in recent memory. I actively rooted for their antagonsit (Peter Dinklage) and actively wanted them to die suffering.

But the film is centered around them, as if it considers them to be sympathetic or charismatic. I found that so jarring.

To be fair, acting, especially by Rosamund Pike is superb, and the cinematography is good too. But the story is horrible. Honestly, who thought people would identify with these characters?

This film has lots of issues.

I think the biggest issue is that lead character. I think the writer was trying to create a anti-hero character that was so fabulous and like cold that everyone would love her, someone like Miranda Priestly from Devil Wears Prada or Chanel from Scream Queens. Someone who is a bad person but is so fabulous that you kind of forgive them. And this character just wasn't that. She wasn't cutting enough like the previously mentioned characters, that isn't the fault of the actor, it is the writing and filmmaking. The thing that both the things i mentioned have that this movie lacks is Camp. They are both dripping in camp and that is what makes them work. This movie doesn't have that. It doesn't have them campy lines that make you laugh and stick in your head. I think this movie would have been improved so much if it just had that sort of cheekiness and really sharp cutting one liners.

Because the character isn't strong enough or likeable enough it makes you disconnect with her. She does horrible things to these poor old people. That single line there is her whole character. We know nothing about her and we don't really learn anything more than that. This make it incredibly hard to sympathise with her when the one thing we know is she is awful. She is incredibly one dimensional.

I also think the pacing if pretty bad. It got to a point in the movie that seemed like the climax then i checked and it still had 40 unites left.

It doesn't look too bad so that is one positive. I think i didn't like that it devolved into such a played out thriller trapping.

I actually think that there is a great idea in here, however i think that it should be flipped. I think that it would make a better movie if we followed the story of someone who had been conned by this woman or maybe a family member trying to save their parent and the villain of the story was the woman who is taking advantage of these people. I think that would have been much better and clearer.

I think you could probably skip it.

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.

This Marla character is just pure vile evil, in a bad way, nothing cunning or intelligent. The plot holes are just too annoying to ignore, it edges to simply terrible filmmaking. Acting is top notch, though, but the story and "non-antagonist antihero" aspect fail miserably.

The first hour of this film is so good that it manages to carry the ridiculous implausibility of its second hour to a satisfactory conclusion. If it had not tried to become "Mission: Impossible" and stayed confined to the small-time grift of elderly care abuse, this would have been one of the best films of the year. However, like the characters in the film, the writer / director gets greedy, and pays for it.

What a horrible movie. Peter Dinklage is perhaps the only saving grace in an otherwise badly acted /directed story. The subject matter is improbable and the two halves of the movie just do not go together. i don't know what the writer and director were thinking. Waste of time

It was a good movie for first hour and so but then after that it suddenly bombed. If they had put little more thought on how to end it would have been a good movie

Beyond stupid. Characters so illogical. Wanted to bang my head against a wall

This film is the definition of repulsive. AVOID!

It is a hateful piece of trash, smart ass girly predators who prey on the elderly, frail and vulnerable vs the incompetent male mafia and legal system.

I felt bad at watching this movie. This is my first review in a while and I came just to express my frustration. Life is not anything close to all that happened in that movie.