On February 8, 1977, Indianapolis resident Tony Kiritsis marched into Meridian Mortgage, wired a sawed-off shotgun to executive Dick Hall’s head, and held him for 63 hours. He paraded Hall through the city, then delivered a rambling live press conference that even cut in on John Wayne. It is a hell of a story, and you can see why Gus Van Sant wanted to film it. Shot mostly in jittery real time, Dead Man’s Wire aims for a miniature Dog Day Afternoon: street-level spectacle, media frenzy, one very bad idea spiraling into a civic crisis.
The difference is in the framing. Lumet’s Dog Day let you feel for its antihero without pretending he was right. Van Sant treats Kiritsis as a blunt allegory for today’s economy, a little guy crushed by finance and pushed past the brink. Bill Skarsgård goes all in as Tony, a feral, fast-talking live wire in lime polyester and a tragic mustache. Dacre Montgomery plays Hall as an affable scion, and Al Pacino shows up for a winking cameo as Hall’s father, which seals the Dog Day connection. Colman Domingo nearly steals the movie as radio host Fred Temple, who becomes an on-air negotiator and accidental therapist.
Moment to moment, the film works. The handheld urgency is vintage Van Sant, the crowd control and media choreography feel chaotic in the right way, and Skarsgård delivers one of his most focused performances. The trouble is the movie’s moral math. Working from Austin Kolodney’s script, Van Sant leans hard on the idea that Meridian sabotaged Kiritsis’ mall project, which slots neatly into a present-day banks-as-villains narrative. There is no clear evidence that happened in the real case, and reshaping facts to fit the thesis turns a knotty incident into a sermon. What starts as tense procedural becomes a crowd-pleasing scold, the kind of story that flatters our anti-institution anger while dodging complexity.
I kept wishing the film interrogated its own sympathy. Is Tony a desperate man whose pain curdled into menace, or a folk hero the movie would prefer us to cheer. Van Sant says he is not making a documentary, fair enough, but when your argument depends on invented corporate malfeasance, the meaning of what we are watching changes. The result is energetic and watchable, yet oddly hollow. It plays, then it nags.
Performances and craft aside, I was overall not a fan. The filmmaking has snap, Skarsgård and Domingo are terrific, but the story feels stacked to reach a foregone conclusion. Instead of a clear-eyed companion to Dog Day Afternoon, we get a sleek polemic that wants catharsis more than truth.