The pizza bomber case is among the wildest American crime sagas of this century.
In the early 2000s, a Pennsylvania pizza delivery man with a bomb strapped around his neck was forced to haphazardly rob a bank. Once apprehended, the bomb detonated. But that shocking moment was only the entry point to a series of violence and deception with one unwell woman at the helm.
All the gory details are recounted in Evil Genius, a new dark comedy that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and is directed by none other than Friends star Courteney Cox.
The unbelievable sequence of events lends itself easily to a film, given the drama that unfolded. Led by The Act’s Patricia Arquette as psychotic mastermind Marjorie, the film also stars Stranger Things’ David Harbour as Bill, the man who can’t help but go to gruesome lengths, all for his love for her.
Stemming from Marjorie’s attempt at nabbing a lucrative inheritance from her father, the pizza bomber incident is the climactic end to a chain of violent crimes that involved multiple murders, a body in a freezer, and attempts by Marjorie to pin it all on her closest co-conspirators.
Or as the film’s opening disclaimer glibly puts it, “you can’t make this s--t up. And mostly we didn’t.”
Those details of the crime(s) are now the stuff of legend, all of it chronicled at length in Barbara Schroeder and Trey Borzillieri’s Netflix true crime docuseries of the same name, from which this film draws inspiration. Where that viral sensation meticulously and grimly unfurled the exploits in slow-motion car crash fashion, here we sink into the grimiest aspects for the sake of laughs. There are shotgun blasts to the head, hoarding, a steady stream of swear words, and gloopy Vienna sausage sludge.
In opting for bawdy humor before building intrigue or motivation, Cox’s film holds nothing back in terms of loud absurdity. You just might wish it had—even a broad sensationalist like Ryan Murphy would call the film a bit much.
Fatally for the proceedings, it quickly becomes hard to follow how one action in Marjorie’s plot begets the next, with the action moving too quickly past her motivations and her psychosis. A previous husband whose murder she committed but evaded punishment for only gets a quick mention–a significant detail for the real-life case that only underscores how long her dangerous nature was left to fester as the bodies piled up. Evil Genius is a hurried mess, rushing through the particulars at breakneck speed, hoping it will obscure its faults.
Beyond its rushed delivery, the film’s humor has a mean-spirited core. Rather than the sad truth of mentally ill folks driven to violence, Cox and her screenwriter Courtenay Miles churn the story into crass comedy, the kind where punchlines come not from smart observation of its characters, but from slurring insults and gross injury. It’s all nastiness, but without a satisfying payoff or the thrill of any real narrative boundaries being pushed.
Even with a gifted ensemble (including the likes of Garret Dillahunt as a rapist and, most strangely, Spotlight director Tom McCarthy as the slain delivery man) at its disposal, Cox nevertheless doesn’t offer much observation towards what drew this band of criminal misfits together.
In different hands, the pizza bomber incident is a Coens-esque tale of fatefully foolish scheming with grave human consequences, all committed by a cast of compelling eccentrics. But here all that hubris and personal failing is fodder for laughs more puerile than sharply observed.
It all plays into some of the worst impulses of true crime as a genre, a dehumanization that is granted to both victim and perpetrator. To its credit, Evil Genius may be aiming for something beyond the tabloid drama of its source documentary. Instead, it wants to be a character study of a fundamentally cracked relationship–both between Marjorie and Bill, and between Marjorie and reality–but that doesn’t mean that its constant giggling and gawking amounts to much more than rubbernecking.
However, as the volatile Marjorie, Arquette strikes the delicate tonal balance that the film fumbles throughout. It’s a real go-for-broke performance, with the Oscar winner breezing through Marjorie’s most verbose tirades in a dizzying spectacle of frantic highs and inward lows.
If the film lacks curiosity about what exactly is wrong with Marjorie, Arquette still doesn’t play her as a simple, uncomplicated monster. There’s dimension to the way she tears into the character’s mile-a-minute ferocity, at times funny and often terrifying.
At the center of Arquette’s portrayal is Marjorie’s desperation—not just to get away with it all, but to cold-heartedly defeat all those who stand in her way. In Arquette’s devilish delivery, her most haunting effect is that we’re not quite sure if it is fate or herself who gets the last laugh.
