Thought this was fairly bad. Naff, shallow, smug, toothless. The characters are so thin - here's Carey hanging out in her coffee shop, dissing customers and chatting with her cool sassy romcom boss, hip, witty exchanges you can write yourself in your head - mega cringe.
SPONGLERS BELOW
Badly edited - some noticeable continuity fuckups and so on, and what's with that midsection montage that goes on 80% longer that i needs to?
I was disappointed that, as someone else said, she doesn't actually fuck anyone up - she just gives them a telling off. If she actually was a serial killer-torture-revenge person, it would have made the whole revenge genre flick pastiche work - instead it's just... mucking around.
I found her lectures sort of embarrassing. Like, one of the would-be rapists says, "I thought we had a connection!" and she says "Oh yeah? What's my job? Do you even know my name?" and the guy is flabbergasted like damn, she's got him there. But I couldn't help but think: "Come on. That isn't what he meant. He meant in the bar earlier they had some chemistry, they were flirting, that's a connection." (I understand that isn't what happened because whole routine is that she's too drunk for any of that sort of thing to happen, and she never reciprocates anything - but like much of the film it felt too easy somehow, too straightforward, too dumb.)
I liked that she set Alison Brie up for a revenge rape, as it embraces the nastiness of the genre concept and made her much more complex and contradictory - but it turns out that didn't happen either, not because Carey is a Paul Bateman fantasist but because she's simply, boringly, above reproach. It would also have raised the stakes for the final confrontation at the bachelor party, because we'd have known what she was capable of.
I thought the ending was going to be more interesting than it was - like, ha, she just failed, the cops don't care because she was a slut and the patriarchy wins, what an ending, a big meta punchline. But that didn't happen, oh well.
As far as hip contemporary films addressing similar themes goes, it was way less effective or interesting than Under the Skin or I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Radically different films but they express some related sentiments with far more ingenuity and creativity and make much bolder statements.
