There is something especially bleak about a killing dressed up as a holiday. Trophy Wife: Murder on Safari opens on the African plains, a rifle, and a wife who would not survive the trip home — and spends its runtime pulling apart how a hunting "accident" became one of America's stranger murder convictions.

The subject is Larry Rudolph, a wealthy dentist whose wife Lori died on a safari in Zambia, officially from a gunshot while the gun "discharged itself" in a case under the bed. Investigators saw a man with a mistress, tens of millions in life insurance, and a wife whose death was far too convenient. The documentary walks through the trial that followed and the jury's verdict.

As true crime goes it is comfortingly familiar territory: talking heads, prosecutors, timeline graphics, the whole rinse-and-repeat toolkit. The safari backdrop gives it visual flavor most entries in the genre lack, even when the storytelling itself treads water.

There is a grim justice in watching these gun-toting cowards answer for the animals they senselessly killed — and for the wife too, up to a point. But you cannot shake the sense that Larry Rudolph never quite got all that he deserves. A solid watch for the case itself; the execution earns it a middling score.