Recensioni di Metacritic

More sad than salacious, it’s the rare film about a criminal that offers human details without humanizing a man who so many agree was a monster.

It’s quite a story, which Berlinger moves along with unrelenting energy.

At times, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is all about the performances because the movie itself struggles a bit with settling on a tone.

“Extremely Wicked” winds up a thought-provoking piece of cinema that avoids the easy temptation of shock value in favor of a more philosophical take on a diabolical murderer.

It’s a star vehicle that starts and ends with its star, the film around him struggling to justify its existence. Efron is wicked, the film less so.

Dramatically speaking, it’s a failed thought experiment—you get, watching it, why no one has really told this kind of story in this way. But it’s still hard not to admire the film’s perversely un-perverse strategy, its good-faith attempt to do something more than simply trot out the awful, salacious details.

As an oddity of the serial killer genre, some of Berlinger’s choices ring more as engagingly strange than unsuccessful.

If the narrative film only exists to give us the unsettling sliminess of Efron as Bundy, it won’t be a total waste. But it’s not much of a movie, either.

Zac Efron projects the right amount of edgy, empty handsomeness, but the movie’s conceit doesn’t pay enough dividends — especially when trying to reconcile Bundy’s distortions of reality with the actual terror he caused in the 1970s.

A superficial tale about the casualty at the center of the story, Extremely Wicked, rings hollow and false and is really just as interested in the sensational and salacious as any other reductive thriller.