Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, And Vile Review is a 2019 biographical crime drama about a young single mother who reluctantly tips the attention of a widespread manhunt toward her longtime boyfriend.
Our boundless fascination with serial killers is not all that unsurprising, our curiosity about the horrors we as a species are capable of a natural source of self-preservation, though there’s no doubt probing the motivations to such depravity is endlessly alluring. While the list of homicidal maniacs who have become famous for their exploits is thankfully short, they have become almost legendary for such, with the name Ted Bundy now ingrained in the national conscious as not only one of the most notorious of the bunch, but a model for how there is no easy way to spot the wolf among us.
With director Joe Berlinger‘s latest film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, And Vile, we once again visit the story of this killer’s rise to fame, this time from the perspective of a woman who perhaps was most deceived. She is Liz Kendall (Lily Collins), living in Seattle in 1969, a young mother of a small daughter back on the dating scene. She meets the charming and handsome Ted Bundy (Zac Efron), who finds solace and warmth in the young woman’s company, the two soon beginning a long relationship. Meanwhile, now in the mid 70s, things are strained as he attends law school in Utah, where one night, he is pulled over for a routine traffic stop, only to be picked from a line up as a serial murderer. As the trial mounts, Ted becomes a national celebrity with a growing legion of female fans as Liz struggles to keep herself believing in her lover’s claims to innocence.
Like the sinking of the Titanic, it’s almost impossible to take on such a well-known story without being slightly tainted by what we already ‘know.’ Mostly skipping the sordid details of what Bundy did to the women he attacked and killed, Extremely Wicked begins just about where the trial starts, slowly stacking the evidence against Bundy as Liz (and much of the people watching and reading about the story) try to keep up. The screenplay is based on Kendall’s book The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy, and as such, paints a far more closer look at the personality of Bundy as a man and caretaker than how the media eventually portrayed him.
For that, it does offer something new to the seemingly limitless bounty of material already available, allowing the film to follow Liz and her dilemma as she copes with a slowly eroding reality. Admittedly, as Bundy’s case is of course creepily magnetic, there’s a risk that focusing on Liz rather than Ted could strain our interest, even as she tries to put distance from it all, unsure how to feel about what’s happening, including her exploration of starting again with a new boyfriend (Haley Joel Osment). However, that’s not entirely the case.
This is, by all accounts, a courtroom drama, spun with some creative style that doesn’t wrap itself up in the gruesome spectacle that is ripe for such, allowing both Collins and Efron to put on a couple of solid performances that help greatly in selling the odd twist in this well word tale. Efron especially is well cast, capturing the now iconic and perhaps romanticized version of the killer very well. This can’t be an easy thing to take on, making this the most accomplished work the actor as committed to yet and all the reasons why should give this a look. While it might not corral everything needed in making this more impactful, there’s enough here to make Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, And Vile a worthy pick.