Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile

Well, just yesterday I was complaining about the tendency to sensationalize heinous criminals on the silver screen, and here we are again. The film centers around Ted Bundy, but his crimes seem almost secondary. Instead, the creators chose to highlight how disgustingly charming that bastard appeared (particularly to women). While they weren't wrong in their portrayal, I found their approach deeply unsettling. It felt like watching a film about Josef Mengele where they focus on his exemplary family life, his appeal to women, and how dashing he looked in his SS uniform, only briefly mentioning his penchant for experimenting on people and deciding their fates by the thousands. Wouldn't that be a pleasant watch? Absolutely not. This film disappointed me primarily because it seemed to glorify this charismatic asshole (and I won't apologize for that word) who tortured and murdered women for sheer pleasure, without the film giving adequate attention to his victims. If I had known any of his victims personally, I doubt I could stomach watching this until the end. / Lesson learned: Murderers aren't rock stars; they're killers of innocent people. (03/27/2022)

This is an interestingly grasped and successfully made profile of a madman capable of hiding his true personality almost even from himself. The film does not show a single Bundy murder and only depicts his deceptively “normal” position. If it weren’t for two hints of his dark nature, it would appear that he perhaps wants to deny the accusations against him. Efron turns in an entertaining performance with his portrayal of Bundy’s wily adroitness as a law student in the courtroom. And it is emotional with the story of his girlfriend, torn by the inner conflict between being in love and doubts/fears that she might be wrong in believing in his innocence. Her situation is the film’s dramatic engine. (01/22/2020)

He's young, charming, educated, handsome, and he also kills women sometimes. Ted Bundy was one of America's most terrifying serial killers, but what he was doing was long refused to be believed by those closest to him and much of the American public. And Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile shows that this is actually quite understandable... Zac Efron gives a very good performance and Joe Berlinger is quite clever at playing with the audience. Unfortunately, the film runs out of ideas somewhere in the middle and starts to become unnecessarily transparent and frankly a bit untrustworthy. Which is quite a pity. (05/23/2019)

Berlinger failed at this. In the documentary The Ted Bundy Tapes, he painted a very detailed portrait of a psychopath / uncertain poser / media star who perfectly enjoys the position of a manipulator. In the film, he immersed himself quite clumsily in one of the episodes from the life of the serial killer and tries to build a story whose perspective will be that of light enchantment. The film thus portrays Ted as he saw himself - as an irresistible sovereign, a romantic fugitive, or a charming star who lights up in front of the camera. Zac Efron nails this aspect of him with pleasure, which unfortunately sometimes borders on campiness (the scene where Ted escapes from the Colorado courthouse and walks down the hippie macho street is more like a B-movie comedy). The arc of the film has a clear tendency to shock by reversing the perspective in the last minutes, but it only works at the cost of a lot of cheap reduction and posturing. As a director, Berlinger is no great psychologist, and in fact the scene with the dog barking and demonic glances through the bars smells of a lack of a killer’s skills on the part of the creators. At the same time, there is no denying that the character of Liz (a victim that Ted did not physically harm) could be very impressive elsewhere... but here, she is so passive and purposeful that she cannot be taken very seriously. Bundy is a fascinating character at the very moment when he manages to penetrate behind the mask of the American dream. The documentary was able to deftly remove it, whereas the film gets a little drunk on it. (05/03/2019)

Excellent work in terms of topic and screenplay. The same may be said of the two main characters, Z. Efron and L. Collins, one of whom gave a wonderfully in-depth studied performance which was almost completely flawless and the other presented a really dramatic struggle between feelings and conscience. I hadn’t heard about the real events before seeing this movie and I liked how the filmmakers left out the violent part, concentrating more on the main hero and demonstrating why he was so admired and popular. This movie really is worth seeing. (12/13/2020)