Sharing its title with Netflix’s hit 2018 documentary series, this slipshod vehicle for Patricia Arquette and David Harbour embellishes the facts with comedy, but not much humanity.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
@guylodge See All
If you were glued to “Evil Genius,” Netflix’s 2018 documentary series about the bizarre “pizza bomber” killing of 2003, but wished its true-crime study rang just a little less true, then Courteney Cox’s new film of the same title has you covered. Dramatizing that sad, sordid story of weaponized criminal incompetence into a heightened comedy of errors, the film has little to reveal that we don’t already know, so settles for raking over the stranger-than-fiction facts of the case with lurid, mocking glee. Viewers’ mileage will largely depend on their patience for Patricia Arquette’s unmodulated, to-the-rafters performance as the scheme’s criminal not-so-mastermind Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, which is scarcely tempered by David Harbour’s more quietly shambling work as her co-conspirator and sometime lover Bill Rothstein.
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