Only animals, the film suggests, can resist the killer’s allure, as we watch a whimpering dog back away when Bundy and Liz visit the pound. Even the judge in his televised 1979 murder trial (played, delightfully, by John Malkovich) seems as spellbound as the gallery filled with fluttering young women.
“Bless your heart,” he remarks to the showboating defendant, complimenting his legal skills and passively tolerating Bundy’s impromptu marriage proposal to one of the witnesses.
Scenes like these strike an unfortunate comedic note that undercuts the seriousness of Berlinger’s point: that devils may come disguised as angels. In documentaries like his stunning “Paradise Lost” trilogy, he has repeatedly interrogated our flawed ability to accurately identify monsters, chipping away at our biases to expose their fragility. Yet while Bundy’s well-documented charisma is on full blast here, we only fleetingly feel its chill. And by leaving most of his heinous acts off screen, Berlinger (who also has a Bundy documentary, “Conversations With a Killer,” on Netflix) is apparently relying on unwitting audiences being as devastated by his guilt as poor Liz.
All this makes for a very odd picture, one that purports to care about the women Bundy duped — including Carole Ann Boone (Kaya Scodelario), who married him and had his daughter — while simultaneously marveling at their gullibility. Efron’s smoothly manipulative performance makes a mockery of their devotion, so much so that at times the movie appears less about the psychology of a specific sociopath than a general comment on women who shield such men and even hanker after them.
This longing to touch the flame and tame the dragon could have made for a fascinating thread in the familiar serial-killer narrative, but “Extremely Wicked” (the title comes from the judge’s characterization of Bundy’s crimes) is too unfocused and lacking in imagination to pick it up. Early scenes detailing Liz and Bundy’s 1969 meeting and happy homemaking with her small daughter are followed by years of arrests, escapes and multistate charges for his still-unseen crimes. The final third leaves Liz to her drinking and depression as the movie transforms into a courtroom procedural and a showcase for Bundy’s strutting self-confidence.
Blurring documentary and drama with the overused tic of playing real-life footage over the end credits, Berlinger still leaves Bundy no more than a slick enigma. It’s the same problem that dogged the director’s excessively flattering 2016 portrait of motivational speaker Tony Robbins: at a certain point, we realize that Berlinger might simply be unable or unwilling to look beyond the dazzle.
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‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’
Rated R for a lot less violence than you’d expect from a serial-killer movie. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.