I Care A Lot (2021)

I don’t know how Netflix’s “here’s what your next media piece should be about” algorithm works, but presumably it spits out three random words and then it’s up to a bunch of screenwriters to figure out how to make a story from it.
If I’m right, that means the computer vomited out “elder abuse,” “scam artists” and “girl power,” and instead of someone rerolling the word generator, they looked at that and thought “yes, this is exactly what the world wants to watch!”
Which is how we ended up with “I Care A Lot” (2021).

Netflix seems to have a terrible habit of taking shitty movies and cutting together really good trailers. I first noticed it with “Spenser Confidential” (2020), and then it happened here.
The trailer showed this movie to be about a scam artist, Marla Greyson (Rosamund Pike), using her powers of legal guardianship to scam old people out of their money, legally, picking the wrong old woman to scam, and getting completely rail-roaded because of it. The trailer very clearly prompted us to root against her, as her vile grift was immediately apparent.
The movie, however, showed Marla running her scam, getting away with it, and ultimately getting everything she wanted; there was the unshakeable feeling that we were supposed to be rooting for her the entire time.

The movie started by showing Marla running her scam: she found an old person who was nearing – but not in need of – supervisory care yet, getting a doctor on payroll to help fudge some documents, lying to a judge, and then taking legal custody of said old person and 100% of their belongings and assets, mostly for personal gain. There was also a running monologue going on; it very much felt like a gender-swapped “Wolf of Wallstreet” (2013).

So Marla found her next target: Ms. Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), a woman who lived by herself, no living relatives, no major ties, retired long ago with an incredible savings account. She was the perfect mark.
Marla went through the motions of taking legal guardianship and got as far as putting Ms. Peterson into a retirement home, as run by another man on pay role, Damian (Sam Rice).
Turns out that “Ms. Peterson” was a fake name and she was the mother to a very dangerous Russian mafia crime boss: Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinkledge), who had nothing even close to a Russian accent nor a plot-necessary reasoning to be Russian. He could have simply been an American drug kingpin, for all the importance his background played.

Marla and Roman then spent the movie fighting each other – initially with lawyers, and then with guns and knives and chloroform – only to both fail spectacularly.
By the end, through a surprisingly clever loophole, Marla made herself Roman’s legal guardian, and right as she was about to financially murder him, he offered her financial backing to become a CEO of a company entirely based around the idea of legal guardianship, which she jumped on immediately.
Considering she was making a deal with the man she’d tried to kill - and who’d tried to kill her - her instant willingness to join forces was both foolish and out of character, as she was shown to be meticulous and anal-retentive about plotting out her next victims.

At multiple points in this movie, Marla told people – usually men – that she wasn’t afraid of men threatening her because they had threatened her during her entire career/rise to power and she’d never had to back down, that those threats were always empty.
I could understand this point if she were, say, a woman in a government office, or working at Intel or Google or some other (relatively) moral company.
But considering her clientele were unwilling and that one of the threats we saw was from the son of a woman she’d involuntarily committed to a retirement home, her claims quickly shifted the tone from #GirlBoss to #StopBraggingAboutIllegalShit.

They also made Marla a lesbian, with Fran (Eiza Gonzalez) as her girlfriend, which is fine, but considering the inappropriate “girl power” vibe this movie was trying to spin, the lesbian angle felt less like something organic and more like someone trying to cram in another “equality” trope for internet points.
“Look at this strong, conventionally-attractive lesbian with her own business!” is not good ad copy to push when that business is built on abusing old people.

Speaking of running your own business: I like the idea. I’m all about an entrepreneurial spirit and making money. Heck, I’ve done it.
But at one point, Marla bluntly told Roman that she was more than willing to be bought off, but that his lawyer simply hadn’t offered enough money.
I don’t remember the exact line, but it was something simple like “I like money.” Which… yeah. So does everyone; I’m not going to fault Marla for being driven by profits, because that’s how life works.
But something about her stating it so simply made it feel stupid and cartoonish. It’s the kind of line I’d expect from those stupid 1980s Bond villains, right before they throw a stack of Benjamins into the air; it weakened her character in my eyes in a way that she couldn’t recover from.
And let’s talk about Roman’s lawyer, Dean Ericson (Chris Messina).
For starters, when Roman wanted to get Dean involved, he said “get Ericson” in a particularly foreboding way, and then Dean showed up wearing an incredibly snazzy suit and a necktie that I now want. It was the kind of introduction that, in any other movie, would have revealed a bloodthirsty law-monster who could find any document, produce any witness, and completely destroy anyone in any court room.
Instead, Dean was about as effective a lawyer as I am, and I’m not a lawyer.
He went to Marla with zero documentation and a low-ball offer to ‘buy’ what he wanted from her, and when he actually got into the court room to argue the case for freeing Ms. Peterson, he still had zero documentation to support his claims, no proof of connection to Ms. Peterson, and one affidavit from an ex-employee of Marla’s, which Marla immediately counteracted with records of said employee being a trashbag.
So… why did Roman keep him on retainer? It was made clear that Roman had the necessary financial assets to get the best of the best for whatever he wanted, so why was his lawyer so spectacularly bad at the one thing he was hired to do?

At one point, during one of Roman’s attempts at killing Marla, he had his henchmen knocker her unconscious, pump her stomach full of vodka, and then make it look like she died driving drunk.
Except that didn’t happen, because this movie is stupid.
Instead, somehow Marla woke up as her car careened down the road and launched itself into a flooded quarry, wherein she had the wherewithal to undo her seatbelt, kick out the back window, and swim to the surface, despite it being cold water, having a stomach full of high-proof alcohol, and it being the middle of the night. By all accounts, she should have died of A) alcohol poisoning, B) the car crash/drowning in the car, or C) hypothermia. Yet, somehow, she survived all three, to the detriment of us all.
Oh, and apparently one of her teeth got knocked out, so she dropped it into a quart of milk and had a dentist reinstall it at four in the morning.
I can only assume she paid said dentist a massive wad of cash to not ask questions. There was zero value added to watching anything about Marla’s tooth.
Unclear why Roman’s men couldn’t have killed her and then staged the drunken accident, or done any more amount of work to ensure she actually died.
Meanwhile, a different group of henchmen went after Fran too, and somehow also failed to kill her, despite having guns and blunt weapons.

On top of everything else, this movie had an issue with colors.
The most notable was with Marla’s eyes. Any time Marla’s face was the focus of the camera, her eyes were an impossibly-bright blue – a shade only accomplished with photo-editing. Any time she wasn’t looking directly at the camera, her eyes were a dull blue-green. 
Then, whenever blood was shown, it was bright red, almost red-orange, like what you get when you ask a child to draw blood and they just pick the ‘red’ crayon from the Crayola box, instead of the dark crimson fluid that actually flows through our veins.
And then there was the sunlight. Not actually ‘colors,’ but in the same realm: an entire day was lost driving through town. Sunrise was shown at the beginning of a scene, we saw full daylight, and by the time the chain of events was done, it was sunset. Contextually, it did not fit; there was no reason that an entire day passed in what was clearly only a few hours.

And shame on whoever cast Peter Dinklage as this movie’s villain. He wasn’t a “good” villain; he was a whiny, child-like monster who screamed and threw fits when he didn’t get exactly what he wanted. He had no plan, no decent backstory, no reasonable command of his people. There was nothing about Roman that made me enjoy his position in this movie. He was so poorly written.

Ultimately Marla – with Roman’s financial backing – created a country-wide company called “Grayson Guardianships,” network of subsidiaries with the sole purpose of forcing old people into homes and stealing their money, and that’s… a choice. 
In the very last scene, Marla was shot dead by a family member of a woman she’d locked up, and I think that’s what was supposed to be Marla’s comeuppance, but her company had been built and she’d clearly enjoyed her fancy new lifestyle for however many years passed.
Not only was the problem not solved by Marla dying, but because she got the chance, she made it worse.

There were so many other things wrong with this movie, but I don’t have the time, nor you the attention, to nit-pick every line of the script.
Do not watch this.
Shame on whoever at Netflix approved this movie for development and release.
1 Claw. That’s it. Don’t watch.