1977, Indianapolis. Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) takes broker Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) hostage and demands to be paid what he believes he is owed — beginning a tense, days-long stand-off.
In 1975, Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon saw a young Al Pacino play a sweaty, livewire stick-up man taking hostages at a financial institution for supposedly moral reasons. In 2026, Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire sees Bill Skarsgård play a similarly sweaty, livewire stick-up man taking a hostage (Dacre Montgomery) for supposedly moral reasons. And in a neat bit of circular casting, Pacino has lived long enough to see himself on the other side of the equation.
Skarsgård — the member of the Swedish acting dynasty most dedicated to playing scumbags, villains and evil clowns — plays the real-life kidnapper Tony Kiritsis. In 1977, Kiritsis walked into the Meridian Mortgage company in Indianapolis, and attached a “dead man’s wire” to the neck of mortgage broker Richard Hall (Montgomery), a device rigged to fire a shotgun should anyone interfere. What followed was a stand-off of both fury and farce.
The film’s main strengths are in its straightforward, sweaty tension. As a no-nonsense thriller, it’s plenty suspenseful, all sold by a solid ensemble…
Van Sant — who has not made a film in eight years, since the underrated indie comedy Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot — has some experience in this sort of material. His 2008 awards-hoovering Milk dealt with the political violence of the ’70s, while 2003’s Elephant probed the psychology of school shootings.
This doesn’t feel quite as essential as those films, not quite as rich in detail or emotionally complex. Tony has convinced himself he is on a quest of righteousness, of standing up for the little guy, but he seems thinly sketched as a character, mostly angry and muddled. Van Sant spies an angle in how the then-evolving media landscape shaped the case: plucky TV reporters, including Linda Page (Myha’la), swayed the events and the resulting court case, while local DJ Fred Temple (an always-charming Colman Domingo) becomes an unlikely mediator. But the message feels a little simplistic.
The film’s main strengths are in its straightforward, sweaty tension. As a no-nonsense thriller, it’s plenty suspenseful, all sold by a solid ensemble: Montgomery puts in a thoughtful and nicely underplayed turn as the hapless hostage; his despair when his father, played by Pacino, refuses to apologise to Tony is gently heartbreaking. Cary Elwes is almost unrecognisable as a jaded detective, and Skarsgård can do crazed lunacy in his sleep.
This film is based in part on 2018 documentary Dead Man’s Line, whose directors, Alan Berry and Mark Enochs, serve as consultants, and perhaps Van Sant felt the need to honour the history. The obligatory footage of the real events over the closing credits has become its own cliché in these films, but it does give you the gnawing sense that the non-fiction version of the film serves this story better. Still, it’ll keep your heart rate up.
Van Sant’s previous historical fictions have been more incisive, but this is a tense crime thriller, with a solid new addition to Bill Skarsgård’s rogues’ gallery of scumbags.