It's nice that Rosamund Pike now has a Chinese name; she looks part Chinese and indeed has some Chinese blood. It's also especially appropriate that now China has a film market of 46.5 billion Yuan (7 billion USD) compared to that of U.S., which totaled just 4.4 billion USD(28 billion Yuan) this year.

As proposed in the Mafia boss's speech at the film's end, there is no reason that unwilling but win-win bedfellows should be made because of money. In fact, it is literally the oldest line of business human beings has ever invented.

Apart from the usual scapegoat of evilness in the form of "Russia Mafia" in a film by Jewish producers, not quite surprisingly, Chinese (at least part) and Latina actresses take on protagonist roles. Other than making a few new tweaks and mixes (mainly the roles that minorities and women can play) with what Hollywood's vast arsenal of cliches in film-making has to offer, the film does not bring adequate sensation, or food for thought, or even entertainment.

It is sad that the film treats the social problem it taps into, which is the situation of the elderly in America, with disregard and neglect. Fighting among themselves through the length of the film, the protagonists in the end only come to cooperate to build a business empire out of exploiting older people. The film, in its ending narration, gave a long speech to its main actress to exhort the virtue of dishonesty and the ethics of mafia. One would wonder why this kind of film would ever appeal to the public in a country that boasts, or once boasted, the largest stable industrialized middle class in history.

Admittedly, the film ends with the protagonist at the height of her success gunned down by a victim’s son to "avenge" for the "wrongs" the protagonist committed against the elderly. The scene's purpose as well as function is, however, suspect. It feels like a plaster affixed at the end so that the film would pass some kind of propriety check or to avoid a larger market failure.

In fact, the film feels like a perverse manifesto against the generation of the baby-boomers who fulfilled their end of the social bargain, carried America through the cold war with their labor and their social ethics, and acted as the ballast of the American dream. Though hidden in innuendos throughout, and made explict in the end by the protagonist's eulogizing speech, what the film calls for is nothing less than the cutting loose of an entire generation of honest working retirees , as well as their posterity's cold blooded looting of the resources and savings that generation has won by their life’s work.

The film may well be foreshadowing the change America is going to go through. With decreasing resources at the disposal of the government, the retiring or retired generations may well see ever fewer social benefits or have to start to work again, if they could find jobs that employ them. They may even have to compete with their grandson's generation or that of their great-grandson for the same sort of minimum wage jobs. And the young is taught not to see the society as their parents or their great-parents once saw, with stable middle class jobs that would give them a decent salary, a decent position in society, and a decent life. Instead of decency, the film seems to inundate, they should embrace a strange strain of social Darwinism that is now called "Involution" in China, only with fewer holds barred.

China still provides a set of social upward mobility rules that rewards honest hard working, but the American version seems to extol crookery and theft and robbery through legal loopholes as something the young should emulate as the sterling example.

In a larger sense, I think the film may well reflect a certain ethos the American empire is veering to embrace. Two decades into the 21st century, we have seen wars for oil, a financial meltdown, a trade war with China, and the mismanagement of the Corona-virus, all of which happen either because of the short term interests of certain ruling elements or because of the disregarding of the common people. Social Darwinism may be something the ruling elements have long had as a credo among themselves, but letting loose its indoctrination among the populace will not only destroy the last vestiges of the American dream but also damage a beset democracy that relies on debt and war for survival for the last two decades.