While Zac Efron does an excellent job playing the serial killer Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, the movie is actually a very sanitized version of Bundy's life, considering the dastardly acts he did.
There was almost no murder scene and except for a short period towards the ending where the brutality and gruesomeness of Ted Bundy's crimes were revealed - the movie feels like a Disneyfied version of a serial killer movie.
It's all good anyhow because unearthing the past and describing the more than 30 verified murders of college women, would've been asking the victims' families to relive their pain once again.
It is however a faithful rendition of what actually transpired in real life especially the part where Bundy was on trial, allowing the viewer glimpses of how charismatic, handsome and cunning the serial killer was - and how he possibly all lured those poor women to their deaths.
It leaves one with the sickening thought that even someone with such veneer of wit and charm can be a vacuous vessel, devoid of almost any iota of humanity and empathy.
The movie is shown from the point of view of his lover, Elizabeth Kendall, portrayed by Lily Collins, the daughter of British pop singer Phil Collins.
She wrote a memoir of her life with Bundy which has become the foundation of this movie. That's why there are long sequences of her, deep in denial with what is happening in her life.
There is a documentary on the actual interviews of Ted Bundy in Netflix. That would be a good bookmark to this movie, especially to students and people who enjoy abnormal psychology. That is because the movie did not really show why he became that way. It just showed the events as they unfolded.
For me, it was a treat to see Haley Joel Osment, the kid in The Sixth Sense, act again. He appears midway into the movie in an important role. I was quite surprised to see that it was him, now all grown up, playing an adult role. It would be great to see him in more movies in the future.
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