I just watched this film and my impressions are mixed, but I'd still say given the film's budget and resources there's more good than bad here. My biggest complaint is the lack of physical malleability that Burke brings to Bundy. Bundy was handsome and outwardly composed when he first met Elizabeth Kendall and an emotional and physical wreck when he was on the run in Florida. He also had a talent for changing his appearance at will; friends and colleagues were often shocked by those dramatic alterations, which seemed to change the way Bundy looked fundamentally. There is no such fundamenatl change in Burke.
One of the previous reviewers noted the lack of a motive for Bundy; but no one has found a way of explaining the profound disturbances in the man's mind that caused him to obsess about and commit actions that he himself couldn't explain in a way that others could understand. The film could have speculated about his breakup with his college sweetheart and the ensuing stint of depression that lasted until he met Liz Kendall (Lee in the film) but I'm just as glad that it didn't follow this interpretation, which was presented so famously by Ann Rule in The Stranger Beside Me, an interpretation I happen to disagree with, insofar as it tries to posit a motive for the killings.
But the film does touch on a basic theme of Bundy's personality. What emerged from psychologist Stephen Michaud's conversations with Bundy in prison was that Ted viewed the world as verging on anomie; he was sure that things and people disappeared all the time without anyone noticing or caring. He was confused (probably quite distraught, too) that his crimes got the attention they did. You see that conflict between Bundy's views and more socially developed, adult views of how the world operated in his conversation with his landlord in the last bit of the film. You catch a glimpse of how fragile Bundy's sense of self really was, and the constant rationalizing he engaged in, a rationalizing that never took into account the humanity of his victims. What you see in the earlier Utah 'romp' is a murderer who enjoyed murdering as if it were a game, in love with his created persona, while in the final scene you see a guy who's really disgusted with himself, no longer able, I'd speculate, to muster the composure to even make an adult woman into a victim.
On another point, the film shows Bundy to be a sloppy operator, revealing his name when he approached potential victims, making up ridiculous lies to his girlfriends, that sort of thing. He was also obsessed with fashion (he stole clothes that he couldn't afford) and had some gross habits (Stephen Michaud mentioned Bundy's nose picking, nail biting, and foot fetishism). There was the Jack Kennedy-esquire Bundy you get from "Deliberate Stranger", but you walk away from "Ted Bundy" with a sense of Ted's quirkiness, and the presence of the much more quotidian perversions of which he was ashamed to talk about even during the last years of his incarceration.
One of the previous reviewers noted the lack of a motive for Bundy; but no one has found a way of explaining the profound disturbances in the man's mind that caused him to obsess about and commit actions that he himself couldn't explain in a way that others could understand. The film could have speculated about his breakup with his college sweetheart and the ensuing stint of depression that lasted until he met Liz Kendall (Lee in the film) but I'm just as glad that it didn't follow this interpretation, which was presented so famously by Ann Rule in The Stranger Beside Me, an interpretation I happen to disagree with, insofar as it tries to posit a motive for the killings.
But the film does touch on a basic theme of Bundy's personality. What emerged from psychologist Stephen Michaud's conversations with Bundy in prison was that Ted viewed the world as verging on anomie; he was sure that things and people disappeared all the time without anyone noticing or caring. He was confused (probably quite distraught, too) that his crimes got the attention they did. You see that conflict between Bundy's views and more socially developed, adult views of how the world operated in his conversation with his landlord in the last bit of the film. You catch a glimpse of how fragile Bundy's sense of self really was, and the constant rationalizing he engaged in, a rationalizing that never took into account the humanity of his victims. What you see in the earlier Utah 'romp' is a murderer who enjoyed murdering as if it were a game, in love with his created persona, while in the final scene you see a guy who's really disgusted with himself, no longer able, I'd speculate, to muster the composure to even make an adult woman into a victim.
On another point, the film shows Bundy to be a sloppy operator, revealing his name when he approached potential victims, making up ridiculous lies to his girlfriends, that sort of thing. He was also obsessed with fashion (he stole clothes that he couldn't afford) and had some gross habits (Stephen Michaud mentioned Bundy's nose picking, nail biting, and foot fetishism). There was the Jack Kennedy-esquire Bundy you get from "Deliberate Stranger", but you walk away from "Ted Bundy" with a sense of Ted's quirkiness, and the presence of the much more quotidian perversions of which he was ashamed to talk about even during the last years of his incarceration.