The first 90 minutes of this movie are absolutely fantastic. They build up Marla as such a despicable, horrid creature that I was actively begging for the Mafia to get sick revenge on her.
The last 30 minutes are Season 8 Game of Thrones level of terrible and ruin what was about to be one of my favorite movies this year. The steps they want to strain credibility were insane. Firstly her surviving after being drugged and put in the water were questionable. The mafia failing to kill her girlfriend was just...how in the world did they fail killing that girl?
Marla just fell in the water (and I'm not going into the 3 minutes she was able to kick in a glass front window underwater and maintain holding her breath), but she still has her wallet to buy things at the convenience store. She gets to her girlfriend literally just before the place blows up, which she had no control over because she literally waited for a taxi.
They complain that they have nothing left but the diamonds, and but they also apparently have a handy wig, a taser, some morphine knockout drugs to pull off some James Bond type of killing of Peter Dinklage. And then when Dinklage survives, he agrees to be her partner. Look, I get she's smart and was gonna kill it with the mafia. But the shit she did was unforgivable, and it strains my belief that Dinklage wouldn't just go out and torture her the first chance he gets. They did not present him as being a "money first" guy, so him overlooking the mother being thrown IN A PSYCHIATRIC WARD is nuts.
Look, I enjoyed 70% of this movie. It was an excellent horror thriller to that point. I would've loved if this movie went the route of Dinklage and the mob being mostly outsmarted by the crazy, maniacally, absolutely dastardly woman. But that movie NEEDED to end with Dinklage personally killing Marla. No if, ands or buts, anything but that ending ruins the point they spent the rest of the movie going for.
It really hurts me to trash this movie, because Pike was fantastic again in her role as a villain and Dinklage really made me want his character to succeed. But that ending was the worst type of cop out possible.
I so love a happy ending. That was a happy ending, right?
And that, kids, is how you make vegan propaganda.
Edit: And by that I mean that I wanted to see an experiment but they clearly were biased towards methods, data, results, etc.