EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE (US - 2019) Directed by Joe Berlinger. Written by Michael Werwie. Cast: Zac Efron, Lily Collins, Kaya Scodelario, John Malkovich, Jim Parsons, Jeffrey Donovan, Angela Sarafyan, Dylan Baker, Brian Geraghty, Terry Kinney, Haley Joel Osment, James Hetfield, Grace Victoria Cox, Morgan Pyle, Ken Strunk, Justin McCombs, Ryan Wesley Gilreath, Tess Talbot, Forba Shepherd (R, 110 mins) Infamous serial killer Ted Bundy has been the subject of numerous true crime books, nearly a dozen movies, and even more TV documentaries. The 1986 NBC TV-movie THE DELIBERATE STRANGER capped off of a banner year for Mark Harmon, who received critical acclaim and a Golden Globe nomination for his performance as Bundy on top of being named that year's Sexiest Man Alive by People. Until then, the former college football star was known as a competent TV actor who was gaining some momentum on ST. ELSEWHERE as lothario Dr. Bobby Caldwell, but playing Ted Bundy unquestionably opened some doors for him and turned him into a big-screen headliner for a couple of years before returning to journeyman duty on TV, eventually finding his career role on the still-running CBS series NCIS. With his charm and good looks, Harmon was perfect casting for a truly reprehensible serial killer who didn't fit the stereotype, one of the main reasons Bundy remains such a popular topic today. The same degree of perfect casting applies to Zac Efron, who made his name as a teen superstar with Disney's incredibly popular HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL franchise. As the years have gone on, Efron has found steady work in comedies both good (NEIGHBORS) and godawful (DIRTY GRANDPA), and his attempts to branch out and be taken seriously have yielded results both interesting (ME AND ORSON WELLES) and woefully misbegotten (THE PAPERBOY). With an absurd panini beard and about ten mintues of screen time, Efron managed to steal this year's earlier THE BEACH BUM from both Matthew McConaughey and Snoop Dogg, and in playing Ted Bundy in the Netflix original film EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE (a verbatim description of Bundy used by the judge who sentenced him to die in the Florida electric chair), Efron uses his persona to chilling effectiveness in a performance that matches Harmon's, but through no fault of his, the film only works in fits and starts.
That's largely due to the approach taken by director Joe Berlinger, helming his first narrative feature since 2000's little-loved BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2. Best known for his documentaries like the PARADISE LOST trilogy detailing the saga of the West Memphis Three, and Metallica's SOME KIND OF MONSTER, Berlinger also directed this year's earlier Netflix documentary series CONVERSATIONS WITH A KILLER: THE TED BUNDY TAPES. A companion piece of sorts, EXTREMELY WICKED is based on the memoir The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy by Elizabeth Kendall, who was romantically involved with Bundy for several years until his initial incarceration in the mid-1970s. Played here by Lily Collins, Liz Kloepfer (her maiden name) is a college student and single mom when she meets Bundy in a Seattle bar in 1969. They instantly hit it off and the film cuts to 1974, with both of them pursuing law degrees and Ted a loving father figure to Liz's daughter Molly. They maintain a long-distance relationship while Bundy is in law school in Utah, where he's picked up as a suspect in a kidnapping and eventually accused of the crime. He keeps giving Liz flimsy excuses about being set up, but when an Aspen, CO detective (Terry Kinney) starts asking questions and contacting Liz, it sets off a chain reaction of investigators in several states gradually realizing that they're all pursuing the same suspect. Despite endlessly proclaiming his innocence, it looks so dire for Bundy that even his own lawyer (Jeffrey Donovan) bails on him with an insincere "Good luck."
EXTREMELY WICKED ostensibly looks at the Bundy story from Liz Kloepfer's point-of-view, but Berlinger sort-of drops the ball on that angle, starting with a rapid jump from 1969 to 1974. We don't see much of the foundation of her relationship with Bundy, or why she sticks with him despite all the evidence against him, and the film ultimately resorts delaying a reveal in the story until it can make a dramatic impact, except that it doesn't really land. Berlinger obviously knows Efron-as-Bundy is the selling point here, so it doesn't take long to shift to that focus, whether it's his two escapes from custody (one from a courthouse and the other from an Aspen jail) and his circus of a trial in Florida (where he fled after Aspen), when he fires his public defender (Brian Geraghty) and represents himself, with prison groupies forming a Bundy fan club in the courtroom, cheering him on and often describing him as "dreamy" and admitting to reporters that they fantasize about him. Exploring that bizarre phenomenon (known as hybristophilia, with Bundy arguably the most prominent example) might've been a more interesting subject for Berlinger to explore, especially when it comes to the pathetic Carole Ann Boone (Kaya Scodelario), a former co-worker of Bundy's in Seattle who follows him to Utah and eventually to Florida, all in the hopes of getting him to fall in love with her.
We never see any of Bundy's killings, but with his tangles with the law and his antics in the courtroom where he often spars with the sardonically folksy judge (John Malkovich) and the incredulous prosecutor (Jim Parsons), all we're left with concerning Liz is her increasing dependence on booze and a hesitant relationship with her nice-guy co-worker Jerry (Haley Joel Osment), who keeps unsuccessfully trying to get her to forget Bundy and move on. This only leads to cliches, like the inevitable scene of Liz gathering all of her empty liquor bottles and throwing them in a trash can, and Berlinger resorting to Scorsese needle-drops like Bundy being hauled out of court to Emerson, Lake & Palmer's "Lucky Man," and escaping from the Aspen courthouse from a second-story window to The Box Tops' "The Letter." EXTREMELY WICKED is a serial killer thriller that wants to be different, realizes there's not enough there for what it wants to do, then tries to have it both ways, which only results in an uneven structure and a lack of focus. In other words, it's flawed but not without interest, thanks mostly to a revelatory performance by Efron and some solid supporting work from the cast, particularly Scodelario, who's good enough here that you wish the story was being told from her POV.
MISS SLOANE (France/US/UK - 2016) Directed by John Madden. Written by Jonathan Perera. Cast: Jessica Chastain, Mark Strong, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alison Pill, Michael Stuhlbarg, John Lithgow, Sam Waterston, Jake Lacy, Christine Baranski, David Wilson Barnes, Chuck Shamata, Dylan Baker, Ennis Esmer, Raoul Bhaneja, Douglas Smith, Meghann Fahy, Lucy Owen, Michael Cram, Joe Pingue. (R, 132 mins) A sort-of MICHAEL CLAYTON take on the gun control lobby, MISS SLOANE is fairly transparent end-of-the-year awards bait that works more often than it doesn't and serves as a reminder that movies for grown-ups used to not be such a rare commodity. The crammed story perhaps bites off more than it can chew yet still seems a little long running past the two-hour mark, and frequently seems like it could've been better served as an HBO or FX series. It also can't help but feel like Aaron Sorkin fan fiction, with debuting screenwriter Jonathan Perera slavishly devoted to the Sorkin style, from every line of dialogue sounding like an over-rehearsed proclamation to the presence of NEWSROOM co-stars Sam Waterston and Alison Pill to dubiously silly character names, though in fairness to Perera, neither "Rodolfo Schmidt" nor "Esme Manucharian" seem quite as improbable as Olivia Munn as THE NEWSROOM's chief financial reporter "Sloan Sabbith," though a point is made of Schmidt's middle name being "Vittorio." Though dealing with a topical subject matter, director John Madden (SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL) gives MISS SLOANE a '70s aesthetic in its matter-of-fact, Alan J. Pakula-esque presentation, right down to a clandestine meeting in a dimly-lit Washington, D.C. parking garage that's straight out of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN.
Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain in icy and driven ZERO DARK THIRTY mode) is a top shark for a powerful D.C. lobbying firm run by George Dupont (Waterston). Dupont wants her to work with Bob Sandford (Chuck Shamata), a representative from an NRA-type organization looking to bring women aboard the pro-gun movement. Elizabeth derisively dismisses the idea, with everyone wrongfully assuming she lost a loved one in a mass shooting. Her rationale is simple: she has the skills and the power plays to sell anything on Capitol Hill, but pushing to make gun access easier is where she draws the line and grows a conscience. She quits Dupont's firm in protest and joins a smaller outfit owned by Rodolfo Schmidt (Mark Strong) that's backing a mandatory background check bill that Dupont and his new top gun Pat Connors (Michael Stuhlbarg) are working to help Sandford shut down. Elizabeth pulls out every trick in the book, putting the cause before all else, including outing colleague Esme Manucharian (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) as a survivor of a high school massacre 20 years ago, something Esme has kept buried from everyone except Schmidt. As Elizabeth's former colleagues--Dupont, Connors, and Jane Molloy (Pill)--plot her downfall with a forgotten incident in her past involving paying for a congressman's overseas trip as part of a lobby for palm oil tariffs (way too much time spent on that scintillating subject), Miss Sloane sets her own plan in motion that exemplifies her core philosophy: play your trump card right after they play theirs and make sure you surprise them.
Chastain commits to the character even as Perera's script has her go through all the predictable arcs. We learn little about Miss Sloane as a person other than she's a loner who doesn't relate to people, thinks only of her work, abuses prescription pills, and frequently enlists the services of male escorts when she needs a release or to "fantasize about the life I didn't want." When her usual appointment skips town, she meets his replacement Forde (Jake Lacy), and it's all business until he starts to sense real feelings in her, and she of course shuts down and sends him away, her illusion of emotionless isolation shattered. You see moments like this coming, and others like the desk-clearing fit of rage when her back's against the wall, the opposition is beating her, and she's questioning her entire career. Told mostly in a series of flashbacks as Elizabeth is testifying before a Congressional hearing overseen by a vindictive senator (John Lithgow) and not following her attorney's (David Wilson Barnes) advice and invoking the Fifth, MISS SLOANE sometimes suffers from its characters giving speeches in lieu of having actual, real-life conversations, but it does a mostly commendable job of replicating an "issues" movie from back in the day, fused with the least grating tendencies of its obvious inspiration in Aaron Sorkin. Madden and Perera succeed in making it less about taking sides on the gun issue and more about the characters while keeping the preachy, hectoring sanctimony (like, everything that ever came out of the mouth of Jeff Daniels' Will McAvoy on THE NEWSROOM) that's often Sorkin's Achilles heel, to a minimum.
There's undoubtedly a smart and funny satirical comedy to be made based on the conspiracy theory that a post-2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY Stanley Kubrick helped NASA fake the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, but the atrocious MOONWALKERS cluelessly pisses away any potential that it had. Written by DEATH AT A FUNERAL scribe Dean Craig, who's having a really off day here, MOONWALKERS stars a visibly bored Ron Perlman as Kidman, a hard-nosed CIA agent already suffering from Vietnam-related PTSD when he's assigned to travel to London with a briefcase full of cash to secure the services of Kubrick in the event Apollo 11 can't land on the moon. Through convoluted and unlikely circumstances, he thinks he's in a meeting with Kubrick's agent but he's really talking to Jonny (Rupert Grint from the HARRY POTTER series), a broke-ass concert promoter who owes money to some gangsters led by Dawson (James Cosmo), all of whom appear to be on loan from a shitty Guy Ritchie movie. Jonny takes the money and passes his acid-dropping buddy Leon (Robert Sheehan) off as Kubrick, but the money ends up getting stolen by Dawson's goons. Kidman tracks Jonny and Leon down, forcing them to rely on a pretentious, would-be filmmaker acquaintance named Renatus (Tom Audenaert) to somehow make a fake moon landing movie.
Laboriously-paced and utterly juvenile, MOONWALKERS makes a couple of easy Kubrick references but doesn't seem to even know much about the legendary filmmaker beyond the idea that he's legendary. There's nothing in the way of industry or political satire or absurdist humor that's inherent in the very concept. Instead, Craig and director Antoine Bardou-Jacquet focus on endlessly repetitive stoner humor, various vulgarities, predictable soundtrack choices (oh wow, hippies tripping on LSD at a happening set to Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit"! Imagine that!), stale sub-AUSTIN POWERS gags where the punchline is pretty much "it's the late '60s, baby!" and over-the-top splatter humor that wouldn't be out of place in an early Peter Jackson movie. What any of this has to do with Kubrick and the fake moon landing conspiracy is anyone's guess. Perlman and Grint never click as a comedy team, with the usually reliable Perlman looking irritable and completely sleepwalking his way through this. MOONWALKERS is appallingly bad, and the only thing resembling any legitimate humor is provided by Stephen Campbell Moore in a too-brief supporting role as Jonny's cousin--Kubrick's agent--a coke-snorting sleazebag with vintage 1969 Michael Caine glasses. Painfully unfunny, loud, abrasively obnoxious, and feeling three hours long, MOONWALKERS is a missed opportunity and a complete waste of time and the emptiest '60s nostalgia piece since the unwatchable PIRATE RADIO. (R, 97 mins)
THE BENEFACTOR
(US - 2016)
Did writer/director Andrew Renzi have any idea what his endgame was with THE BENEFACTOR? Feeling like it was decided to make a second, different movie midway through filming, it starts out like it's headed into commercial psychological thriller territory before abruptly turning into a turgid, overwrought addiction drama. And that's before everything falls into place for a pat, feelgood ending complete with a miscarriage scare and a premature birth that's used to symbolize the rebirth of the central character in the most facile, Intro to Creative Writing way imaginable. Over the last few years, Richard Gere has done fine work in some small, under-the-radar films like ARBITRAGE and TIME OUT OF MIND, but his performance in the Sundance-financed THE BENEFACTOR is self-indulgent, film festival awards baiting at its most transparent and shamelessly circle-jerking. Gere is Francis "Franny" Watts, an impossibly wealthy philanthropist who's fallen into total despair after his married best friends Bobby and Mia (Dylan Baker, Cheryl Hines) are killed in a car crash that happened when Franny was goofing off and distracting a behind-the-wheel Bobby. Five years later, the guilt-plagued Franny is largely a shut-in at his mansion except when he pops into to entertain the kids in the cancer ward at the hospital he owns. He finds a new mission in life when Bobby and Mia's daughter Olivia (Dakota Fanning) reconnects with him to announce she's pregnant and has just married young pediatric oncologist Luke (Theo Jones of the DIVERGENT series). Franny instantly ingratiates himself into the lives of Olivia, who he still refers to by her childhood nickname "Poodles," and Luke, who he keeps condescendingly calling "Lukey," by buying her childhood home and gifting it to them, getting Luke a cushy job at the hospital, and paying off all of his student loans. Franny seems vaguely sinister in the way he's always around and won't take no for an answer, and for a while, it's hard to tell if he's just trying to assuage the guilt he's assumed in Bobby and Mia's deaths or if he's a lunatic with a bizarre fixation on the young couple.
Just as it seems poised to play out like a glossy "(blank)-from-Hell" '90s throwback thriller (which would've been dumb but at least entertaining), THE BENEFACTOR drops everything to focus on morphine-addicted Franny's quest to find someone, anyone, to fill his hydrocodone prescription. In denial that he's a junkie, Franny tries to guilt-trip any medical professional he can find into getting a refill, with no success. Gere is an underrated actor that Hollywood seems to have largely left behind, and the earlier scenes with him shoehorning his way into the lives of Olivia and Luke are moderately effective in their cringe-worthy discomfort, especially when Olivia or Luke lose their patience and Franny immediately blurts out the "Hey, come on, I'm just jokin' around!" excuses. But then it abruptly turns into a completely different movie and he's not even playing a character anymore--he's going through a checklist of "big moments" in a rambling, disjointed film that never comes together and never gives you a reason to care about Franny either as an antagonist or a protagonist. Jones just looks lost throughout, Baker and Hynes are gone before the opening credits, the great WIRE/TREME star Clarke Peters has a nothing supporting role as a doctor, and Fanning is completely wasted, spending the bulk of her screen time sitting on the couch, looking concerned and rubbing her prosthetic pregnant tummy until the script needs her to confront an endlessly self-pitying, withdrawal-shaking Franny and yell "You're not the only one who lost them!" By the end, it's 90 minutes of pointless nothing, and it's too bad there wasn't a benefactor at Sundance to bequeath to Renzi a reason for this confused mess of a film to exist. (Unrated, 93 mins)
