Audiences love watching charismatic antiheroes. A character doesn't have to be exclusively good to be liked by the public – on the contrary, unconditional positivity can even be off-putting. But where do we draw the line between interesting rogues and moral monsters who don't evoke a shred of sympathy? "I Care a Lot" clearly found that line, so what came of it?

But First, the Pros

So, first of all, we all must admit that Rosamund Pike is divine and deserves all the awards in the world. She is expressive, she is convincing, she looks and acts incredibly stylishly. One commenter under the trailer for "I Care a Lot" noted that Pike could make even a movie where she just did laundry for two hours interesting, and I couldn't agree more.

To the strong performances, we can add the equally expressive Dianne Wiest, who perfectly fulfills the task set for her by the director, as well as the somewhat amusing antagonists played by Chris Messina and Nicholas Logan.

The First Twenty-Five Minutes

The beginning of the film aspires to be one of the best setups of the past year. Viewers are not just told about the aspects of the con artist activities of Pike's character, Marla Grayson, a court-appointed guardian, but it's done using the example of a specific person whose life she is ready to ruin for her own greed. Everything in the first minutes of the film is perfect: direction, actors, music, editing, lighting – everything.

The viewer is left choking with indignation at the injustice, at the heartlessness with which Rosamund Pike smiles into the camera. Then our interest is piqued even more when they make it clear that her small-time scams have crossed the path of forces much bigger than herself. We prepare for a battle of wits and cunning. And we get…

The Rest of "I Care a Lot"

First, another movie about bad Russians. Moreover, if you watch it dubbed, you won't even immediately realize that the bad guys are Russian – only in the middle, when they start saying their names, you suddenly burst into a fit of Homeric laughter. It's as if someone flipped a switch, and we found ourselves back in the Cold War period (hello, ""). It's strange that in the film production of a country that pushes so hard for tolerance and racial equality, the absolute villains in most cases are precisely foreigners – Russians, Chinese, Mexicans. Smacks of hypocrisy, don't you think?

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Open material

Secondly, you won't find any interesting showdown here. The film belongs to the "diamond cut diamond" category, and they try to show that against the smart Marla Grayson, they pitted the brute force of organized crime, muscles against brains. However, Marla didn't do anything smart throughout the entire film – moreover, what they try to pass off as her intelligence and cunning crumbles at the first logical argument against her actions – and the brute force of the Russian mafia was shown boringly and indistinctly.

By the middle of the film, it starts to feel like you're watching a new Harry Potter movie, because otherwise, what's happening on screen can only be explained by magic.

And Peter Dinklage. I would very much like to count him as a plus for this film for his years of service, but his character is so clichéd and banal, Peter was given so little material to work with, that no one could have saved his character. Although I can't say Peter tried very hard.

The Antiheroine of "I Care a Lot"

Writing antiheroes is quite difficult. If you overdo it, the viewer simply won't empathize with the characters. The 1988 film "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" comes to mind, where everything was done right – the characters of Michael Caine and Steve Martin were handled very skillfully, on the one hand giving them some principles (at least Caine), on the other hand – balancing their scams with humor and an interesting confrontation based on cunning and outmaneuvering the opponent, without breaking the logic of the characters' behavior. With such a set, we don't even necessarily need to know the characters' backstory to feel an emotional connection with them.

How much of a scumbag was the heroine of "I Care a Lot" written to be, that her opponents were specifically the Russian mafia, because against any other backdrop she would hardly look favorable? And even then, for more than half the film (if not the entire film), I was rooting more for the Russian mafia. We were given nothing to latch onto besides Rosamund Pike's charisma. She doesn't have a single positive quality, even though they tried to sell us that she cares about her partner/girlfriend played by Eiza González, which is hard to believe.

So it turns out that for two hours we watch the scurrying of people on screen for whom we feel no positive feelings. No sympathy, no empathy, not even a simple understanding of motives. And when the balance tips to one side or the other, we don't care. And that shouldn't be the case.

Conclusion

As always, started off well, ended poorly. If you like the setup, you can watch it – the film isn't boring or drawn out – but there's a good chance that at the end of the film, you'll just feel another bout of hatred for humanity.