An average movie

I already saw this movie but since my wife has a weak spot for the genre, I thought I might as well re-watch it with her. Well, I have to admit that I enjoyed it more the 2^nd time around but, when I think about it, it was probably because I saw in the meantime ‘Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes’ (also directed by Joe Berlinger). Indeed, even if the material was quite fascinating, unfortunately, I still didn’t really care about the approach they chose. You can assume that the idea was to tell this story from Liz Kendall’s point of view which wasn’t a bad idea but it didn’t really work, I’m afraid. Indeed, during the 2nd half, pretty much right after the first trial, Kendall took her distance from Bundy and she was barely involved during the rest of the movie, except for getting drunk on her coach and following the news on her TV. Eventually, you wish that they went deeper into Ted Bundy instead and the fact that you learn so little about him after all made the whole thing rather frustrating, especially if you don’t know know much about Bundy and wanted to learn more about him. Eventually, they focused on his escapes and some of his trials and, fairly often, some of the arguments made by the accusation were actually rather dodgy. As a result, you start to wonder if he might have been innocent somehow but, to be honest, I’m not sure if it was what the makers really wanted to achieve here. I think that the idea was to make Ted Bundy look more ambiguous but it was like trying to convince us that Hannibal Lecter was actually a vegetarian. Still, it doesn’t mean that it was a bad movie, far from it. Indeed, it was still a spellbinding story and Zac Efron and Lily Collins were very well cast. Above all, I was really impressed by Efron who easily gave here his best performance so far. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a decent watch and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.