No Man of God

With its religious overtones, this saint vs. sinner drama is more appalling than compelling. Mostly a talky game of cat and mouse, it lacks the mystery and danger of the similarly plotted Silence of the Lambs. Mild-mannered Hagmaier is a buttoned-up Christian who starts each day with prayer and interacts with the worst of humanity to do God's work: He needs to understand how a serial killer thinks in an effort to capture other serial killers. Like Lambs' Clarice, Hagmaier maintains his calm and cool on the surface, even when he's sweating on the inside. But No Man of God is based on real life, and Bundy is most definitely no longer a public menace here. He may be cocky, but he's well-incarcerated on Death Row, and Hagmaier isn't out in the field tracking a murderer. And, of course, since Hagmaier is a man, Bundy sees him as a chum, not prey. While director Amber Sealey tries to show that the stakes are high -- Hagmaier is trying to find out the details of Bundy's murders to give closure to the families before Bundy is executed -- it's hard not to observe that Bundy is a dead man walking.

If there's any doubt about that, when Bundy finally gives a (literal) blow-by-blow account of how he targeted, stalked, raped, and murdered his victims, it feels repulsive that the filmmakers decided to include it. Bundy references 1960s-era detective magazines as a guide for how to get away with murder, showing images of women tied up that convey to viewers the fact that those images carried a sexual titillation for Bundy. Simillarly, when Bundy recounts his terrible acts to Hagmaier, the delivery has an intensity that carries a similar potential. While this is intended to be a film about the quiet, controlled Hagmaier -- the top criminal profiler in history -- the dynamic Bundy steals the focus and makes it about him, even if that's not the intention. Sadly, all that reverberates is that one man, through his evil acts, became an infamous villain; the other, an unfamous hero.