‘Evil Genius’ Review: A Hilarious Patricia Arquette and David Harbour Make for a Bonkers Bonnie and Clyde in Courteney Cox’s Twisted True-Crime Yarn

There are few true crime stories worthier of being filed under “You Can’t Make This Sh*t Up” than 2003’s totally bizarro “Pizza Bomber” case, in which a pair of Erie, Pennsylvania, residents conspired to rob a bank by recruiting a pizza delivery driver to pose as a hostage who showed up at the tellers’ window with a fake “collar bomb” locked to his neck. To say the heist didn’t go as planned is an understatement — shortly after the would-be robber was apprehended by the police, the bomb nevertheless detonated, instantly killing him.

The twisty, tangled chain of events that preceded and followed the incident were documented in the four-part 2018 Netflix series, Evil Genius: The True Sory of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist. Now, thanks to an impressive turn by Courteney Cox in her second feature stint behind the camera, it’s a wildly devious, perfectly pitched black comedy pairing a fearlessly gung-ho Patricia Arquette in the role of chief conspirator Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong and an equally invested David Harbour (barely recognizable under a big, bushy grey beard and thick glasses) as her brainiac partner in crime, Bill Rothstein.

Evil Genius

The Bottom Line Fiendishly entertaining.

Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala Presentations)
Cast: Patricia Arquette, David Harbour, Michael Chernus, Garret Dillahunt, Ryan Eggold, Gregory Alan Williams, Tom McCarthy, Owen Teague
Screenwriter: Courtenay Miles
Director: Courteney Cox
1 hour 34 minutes

Handed its world premiere at TIFF as yet unattached to a distributor, the film could be a good fit in the right hands, especially if the marketing plays up the “so crazy it must be seen to be believed” angle.

Little do the police realize, when they get a frantic payphone call from Rothstein about a body in Diehl-Armstrong’s freezer, that it’s literally the tip of the iceberg where the former couple’s larcenous, double-crossing ways are concerned.

Flashback several months earlier to her plot to have her father (David Rasche) killed for emptying her late mother’s safety deposit box of the $1 million she contends was promised to her. In order to raise the money necessary to pay for the hit, she pitches her still-smitten ex on a bank heist, but Rothstein protests, “We can’t rob a bank. I’m 60 and you’re not Thelma or Louise.”

Enter the unwitting pizza delivery man (Tom McCarthy), whose neck just happens to be the perfect size to fit Rothstein’s convincing collar bomb, and their nefarious scheme starts clicking into gear.

With its cast of colorful co-conspirators — also including Michael Chernus as Marjorie’s fishing buddy, Ken Barnes, who runs a crack house on the side — it’s the sort of proposition that John Waters could have pounced on, but Cox and screenwriter Courtenay Miles (she penned the second season of the Netflix crime series Mindhunter) put their own wacky stamp on it.

There were essentially two ways to go with the source material: either embrace the chaos or invent a clean throughline that cuts through all the outrageousness. In the end, Cox and Miles manage to do both, devising a dysfunctional romance backstory interwoven throughout, presented in flashbacks with the part of young Marjorie played by Arquette’s daughter, Harlow Jane.

Fo her part, Arquette daringly plunges head-first into the bipolar, calculating, manipulative, sociopathic Diehl-Armstrong, trusting Cox to say “cut” or editor Katharine McQuerrey to cut away if she were to go too far over the top. Complete with an unkempt Severus Snape hairdo and garish make-up, her performance hits a notable crescendo in a prison sequence near the end of the film. Taking in the incarcerated Marjorie dictating her version of the events to a fellow inmate as she casually shaves off her eyebrows is a thing to behold.

Cox, who made her feature directorial debut with the 2014 black comedy Just Before I Go, demonstrates a briskly assured feel for the quirky material. Undoubtedly that 10-year Friends tenure didn’t hurt in regard to knowing the best way to choreograph all the funny bits, and the one about the pizza guy heist that goes really, really wrong hits all the requisite marks.