![Risen [Blu-ray]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81CXoRDNxzL._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
First, none of the tags apply to this film. Second, this is a documentary on the Green River Killer, America's most prolific serial killer, and how he was apprehended as a result of an utterly harrowing, terrifying mind-merge between a real-life profiler and Ted Bundy, America's second most prolific and most notorious serial killer. There is otherwise no plot, characters or exploitation of the grisly and unique story. The book on which this film is based is the basis of "Silence of the Lambs" and the "collaboration of one serial killer with police to identify another."
What distinguishes this film is the extraordinary, risky, dangerous, authentically evil performance of Bundy by Cary Elwes. Elwes was the male eye-candy star of "Princess Bride" and a series of romantic adventure films in his youth, when his own beauty and life experience must have taught him how prostitutes and "johns" engage in fantasy possession of another person's body and will. Elwes' powerful beauty faded fast, and he then made a series of poorly acted, shallow, often overplayed and embarrassing films. An actor he was not. But an amazingly intelligent, intuitive, deep-minded person with almost total access to the horrors which underlie such peculiar beauty and obsession as motivates reciprocal using of another person, from prostitution to serial killing, he is. If this is a "performance" of Ted Bundy, it is one of the greatest screen portrayals of direct empathy with evil I have ever seen. More likely this is a revelation of the deepest shames, angers, dangers, revenges and obsessions that possesses often incomprehensible or trivialized psycho-pathology by a man who knows it.
The difference between the Cary Elwes of glamor fame, the Cary Elwes of ham actor distinction, and this Cary Elwes who "is or becomes" the most fully realistically portrayed sexual psychopath in film history is literally unimaginable. Make no mistake:-- this is not a good director getting the best from a second-rate actor. This is an amazing man (Elwes) revealing breadth and depth in serial killer psycho-pathology seen only by those professionals unlucky enough to meet the Real Thing. Yes, bravo Hopkins, Cox and even Hall for dramatic portrayal -- theater work an audience can leave in the theater. Elwes is something of an entirely different dimension of dark reality you will not soon if ever forget.
I will never trash Cary Elwes' work again, though I cannot explain his shallow performances as a youth. Maybe he was just too intelligent and sensitive for the roles his charismatic beauty landed him in and how he was treated and used. I don't know. But somehow he brings real horror up and out of the depths of the human soul for all to see, and it makes me quite glad I never had the misfortune to underestimate the man to his face.
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March 11, 2011 "Please retry" | — | 1 | $15.96 | — |
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Jennifer Coulter
Best Ted Bundy portrayal yet
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 19, 2014