John O'Connor

It's truly very rarely that I watch a movie so upsetting that I feel as if I am duty bound to scream into the void, but having just finished the movie it seems worth it to just say that it was just awful, worse than a waste of time. The acting was great, even the linebackers and bouncers they casted as assisted living campus security, that accounts for the single star this movie was worth. I know it's wrong to give a movie one star like it's wrong to stiff your server, even if they're being rude, unless it was a nearly life-changing traumatic experience, you just don't do it. But this movie was just that bad, it entices the viewer with a pretty sound and seemingly original premise that can't be given away on a thumbnail synopsis, but devolves into something. That's why I really struggle to imagine giving this movie more than a star, beyond the film's major shortcomings as a social critique, at some point I Care A Lot really loses sight of itself, and by the end you're left wondering, what was the film trying to say? The director said the genre of the movie was comedy, so was the point that it's funny to watch someone that imprisons, steals, explicitly tortures, and denigrates the elderly fight against a drug trafficking 'mob boss' for money? Perhaps the part that was meant to be funny was when the man the protagonist has 'ruthlessly' denied any contact with his mom kills her before the credits roll. I spent a lot of the movie thinking some bad thing would happen to the anti-heroine that would set things right in this universe, but when someone actually manages to do something to her without first stepping on a rake, it feels a stomach-churning study on Layer Cake late act protagonist killing. Why did the protagonist survive the impossible just to get killed by a plot device that spent about as much time speaking as getting righteously emasculated throughout the whole movie? I don't enjoy being a hater but this feels like a worrying trend that movies are starting to follow these days, I'm talking about movies not having any sort of purpose. Does it scare you? Does it make you laugh? Does it make you think about yourself and the world around you? If you can't give a straight answer, then you're like me, wondering how the F people who are actually employed by the media to write what they think about movies are saying this might just be the best dark comedy they've seen in their whole lives.