The movie actually starts off well enough, setting the stage for what would hopefully be a satisfying tale of a villain getting their comeuppance. Rosamund Pike plays a professional guardian who supposedly helps those who are unable to care for themselves. She arranges for them to be put in care facilities while she manages their affairs and finances. She, of course, liquidates their assets and steals their money.
At the beginning of the movie, we see her in family court where the son of one of her marks is trying to get his mom out from under her care. She expertly talks the judge into siding with her and also preventing the son from having visitation rights.
Later, she is talking with a doctor who offers up a particularly good mark - a wealthy woman with no family and showing early signs of memory loss. Pike's character and the doctor go to family court and argue that this woman, Jennifer Peterson, should be remanded to her care. The judge is convinced. The woman had not been informed of the hearing and had no representation. Pike's character then visits her house, shows her the paperwork saying that she's now under her care, and she's taken away and basically imprisoned in a facility while Pike and her crew sell off the woman's assets. Pike even finds her safety deposit box, which has millions in diamonds.
It turns out that this woman is the mother of a Russian mob boss. Both have fake identities, so Jennifer Peterson is not really Jennifer Peterson, which is why no relatives turn up.
So, we have here a situation where a truly repugnant woman, one who is also extremely smug and sees herself as a lion who never loses, has, unbeknownst to her, picked a very bad mark. In the real world, the mob boss would probably torture and murder Pike's character, either before or after getting their mom out of this facility. In this movie, however, things do not happen that way.
First, the mob boss sends his lawyer to Pike, requesting that the mother be released, though he doesn't tell Pike who he works for. He also makes oblique references to her being tortured and murdered if she doesn't comply. She is unconcerned. He then offers her a briefcase of money. She refuses and demands much more. Now, a person in the real world would probably realize by this point that maybe they screwed up and would probably take the money and release the woman. Not this lioness, though. She doubles down. She visits the woman in the facility and asks her who she is. The woman tells her that bad stuff is going to happen to her. Pike doubles down again and has this woman confined to her room and given reduced care.
For whatever stupid reason, the mob boss sends 3 goons into the facility to kidnap the mom. This fails spectacularly because they are incompetent, and somehow Pike happens to be there with a baseball bat. I can't think of any logical reason for why the mob boss would have done this. Why not go directly to the guardian? If she wouldn't accept money, maybe she's accept keeping all of her fingers and toes.
Later, the doctor who lied to the court is murdered. Even this does not persuade Pike to change tactics. She keeps digging deeper. Eventually, the mob boss has her kidnapped and her girlfriend beaten and left in their house with the gas on. The mob boss has a conversation with Pike. She demands $10 million. He tells his goons to kill her but make it look like an accident. So, they drug her, put a bottle of alcohol in her hands, stick her in her car, and have it drive off a cliff. Somehow, while the car is speeding toward the cliff, Pike's character wakes from being drugged and is immediately alert and is not in any way mentally or physically impaired. The car goes off the cliff and into a lake or reservoir, but Pike is able to escape the car and walk to a gas station. She wasn't even injured when the car crashed into the water. She eventually finds her way home and discovers her girlfriend on the floor in the kitchen with the place filled with gas from the stove. Pike turns off the gas and drags the girlfriend out of the house. Moments after they leave, the house explodes. So these two failed murders demonstrate both an unrealistic level of incompetence from the mob boss's goons, but I guess it's not their fault when they clearly did enough to kill these two but the plot demanded that they survive, and the writers didn't think to at least make the situations realistic enough where it made sense for them to survive. I guess they figure that dumb luck at just the right moment was good enough.
These two ladies decide to hatch their own plot. Pike had memorized the license plate of one of the mob boss's vehicles. Her girlfriend has a connection at the police dept. who provides them with the address of the owner, which happens to be the mob boss's driver. They follow the driver to an office building. Pike goes into the office building and sneaks into the executive garage. There, she incapacitates the driver and the mob boss's bodyguard before drugging the mob boss so that she can kidnap him. Really? Where did this woman get the stuff she used, and how did she have the skill set to incapacitate these two men that should have some skills of their own?
She drives the mob boss to some random location, drugs him enough to make him OD but not enough to kill him, strips him, and leaves him there. He's brought to a hospital and saved, but he's a John Doe. Pike, meanwhile, was granted guardianship of him because he was a John Doe, and apparently she's able to just lie to the court and say that he should be in her care and that there's nothing he can do about it.
She demands that he give her $10 million. If he does, she'll release him and his mother, and give him back the diamonds. He agrees but makes her an offer. They should go into business together and start a nationwide chain of care facilities where they can grift billions. He'll be behind the scenes, and she'll be the face of the company. She agrees. Everything goes according to plan. She's living the high life and rich.
At the very end of the movie, the son from the beginning of the movie comes up and shoots her dead. The End.
Yeah, this movie was just not satisfying at all. I'm OK with them making me root for a mob boss since it's the only way to make this awful woman pay for what she's doing to people since the legal system, in this world, is completely ill-equipped. However, she never really comes to any realization that she screwed up, and she never wishes she had done something differently. She inexplicably beats the mob boss throughout the ordeal, constantly doubles down on her terrible choices, and she never pays a price for any of that. Instead, she is rewarded for it. The mob boss and his goons apparently have no core competencies, so I don't know how they got to be in the positions they are in because they're constantly making stupid, inefficient choices and not at all being ruthless. This movie should have been over 20 minutes in. Pike's character didn't outwit the mob boss either. She succeeded due to dumb luck, stupid opponents, and having a skillset that defies reason. Yeah, she dies at the end, but that wasn't nearly satisfying enough. I like the people involved, but this movie just irritated me.
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