Carl. Eww!

Goldwyn portrayed one of the great movie villains with Carl. He goes from a likeable, funny guy to an oily scumbag who makes your skin crawl whenever he’s onscreen.

The way he’s cowardly and nervous as he does his evil deeds just makes him slimier. Sam nails it with ‘you snake’.

I love the foreshadowing of his greed early on. Molly says ‘Carl you’re obsessed’ when he talks about money at the start, and he’s clearly envious of whoever owns that red Ferrari outside the office. On rewatch you notice that he’s trying to find out where to have Sam mugged when he asks if they want to do something this evening, and look at the slimy fucker trying to smuggle the shoebox with Sam’s wallet out after he has died. Eww!

My only issue is that the film plays as if Carl wanted Sam murdered, and as a kid I thought that was the case, but now I see that he just wanted Sam mugged and his wallet stolen. Still an awful thing to do to a friend but not quite the Machiavellian sin I mistook it for.