‘Evil Genius’ Review: Courteney Cox Fashions the Pizza Bomber Case Into a Broad, Shrilly Played Farce

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.

Assembled with little formal style or finesse by Cox — in her first feature-length directorial effort since 2014’s Seann William Scott comedy “Just Before I Go” — this very broad affair likely has a built-in audience of rubberneckers, given the level of public fascination that this case has maintained in the U.S. for over 20 years. But it’s doubtful that many would venture out to a theater to see a rehash of a story they they previously binged on from the comfort of their couch. This iteration of “Evil Genius,” like its nonfiction predecessor, would make most sense as streaming fodder, with potential Emmy catnip in Arquette’s offputting but undeniably attention-grabbing characterization. As a gala Toronto premiere, however, the film felt a little small for the room.

The core details of the case are presented much as they were in the doc series and copious headlines before it. On August 28, 2003, middle-aged pizza deliverer Brian Wells (played by actor-filmmaker Tom McCarthy as a hopeless patsy) robbed a branch of PNC Bank outside Erie, Pennsylvania, claiming to be a hostage, with an explosive device collared to his neck that he said would be detonated if his demands were not met. Demanding $250,000 but making off with a four-figure sum, he was apprehended shortly afterwards by police, whereupon the bomb did indeed go off, killing him, and cuing a tortuous, years-long FBI investigation.

Structurally, at least, this calamity serves as the climax of the frenetically pinballing script by Courtenay Miles (a writer on Netflix’s hit crime drama “Mindhunter”), but it’s also nearly incidental to all the other narrative chaos at play, beginning with an entirely different murder at the outset of proceedings — as Rothstein calls the police to report the dead body of Diehl-Armstrong’s boyfriend in her freezer. Where the series worked backwards from the bomb to uncover the botched grand plan behind it, the film loopily joins the dots from an apparent crime of passion to a far more famous crime of greed.

There’s an awful lot of incident here to cram into 97 minutes — the series had more than twice as much time to unfold this saga, and the difference is felt — but Cox’s film distinguishes itself with a greater focus on the toxic, on-off amour fou between Diehl-Armstrong, presented here as an embittered harridan convinced the world owes her a break, and Rothstein, the hapless milquetoast in her thrall. Flashbacks to the characters’ youth (with Arquette’s own daughter Harlow Jane playing her younger self) identify Diehl-Rothstein as an intelligent, ingenuous young woman who just needs a little help to make something of herself. But neither the script nor Arquette’s showy but curdled, stridently one-note performance of terminal misanthropy persuasively draw a line between past and present, and it’s increasingly hard to feel for a character missing this much connective tissue.

Not that feeling is really the point of “Evil Genius,” which mostly dwells on the shouty, combative dysfunction of the relationship between the two principals, and punches down on their plain incapability as criminals: The title is strictly, snidely ironic, as “Evil Genius” flags and foreshadows their every miscalculation with a knowing, get-a-load-of-this smirk. Their accomplices — played by Garret Dillahunt and Danielle Macdonald, among others — are mostly figures of fun, granted limited personality and motivation, as the film increasingly stages their doomed venture as ragged farce.

Tonally, it all feels a bit over-egged: The absurdities of the case would, if anything, register even more startlingly in a more humane, character-oriented study of how it played out. But “Evil Genius” insists on casting a pretty ugly story in the ugliest possible light — quite literally so in the case of Eigil Bryld’s intentionally harsh, roughly framed lensing. The film’s pitiless gray images compete with the abrasive sound design (frequently submerging the dialogue in loud, blunt needle drops that run the rock gamut from Blue Oyster Cult to Radiohead) for maximum unloveliness in a story that, yes, offers precious little scope for grace or beauty. But a little empathy wouldn’t go amiss.