By John Corrado
The latest film from director Gus Van Sant, Dead Man’s Wire dramatizes a 1977 kidnapping that saw a disgruntled Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) take mortgage banker Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) hostage in his apartment.
Hall is the son of the man (played by Al Pacino) who owns the mortgage firm that Kiritsis believes screwed him out of millions of dollars in real estate. So Kiritsis straps a shotgun to his neck, wired to go off if anyone shoots at him, demanding millions of dollars and an apology. This leads to a tense standoff between Kiritsis and law enforcement, somewhat mediated by a local Indianapolis radio host (Colman Domingo).
Van Sant’s film can be enjoyable enough as a ‘70s throwback (right down to the selection of needle drops throughout), but it could’ve been so much better as an actual crime thriller. For starters, this hostage-taking thriller is played as more of a dark comedy, which undercuts some of the suspense, and takes away moral ambiguity from the true story.
Van Sant tries to turn this into a fable about a man rising up against the system that screwed him over, with little question what side he is on (as I quipped in my social media reaction to the film, it “seems frustratingly made for Luigi Mangione simps”). The issue with this is that Van Sant kind of wants us to root for Kiritsis, but there’s little evidence from the true story why we should, or that he was anything other than a mentally ill man who took things way too far in his quest to get what he felt he was owed.
For a film rooted in a true story, the screenplay by Austin Kolodney also openly invents fictional elements. This includes a young Black, female TV reporter (Myha’la) who wants to get her big break through the story, but isn’t taken seriously enough in the newsroom. It’s a mere distraction, but also indicative of how Kolodney and Van Sant are so desperate to turn this into some sort of progressive polemic about the oppressed rising up, that they are open to adding things.
Van Sant aims for the 1970s filmmaking of Dog Day Afternoon (right down to the inclusion of Pacino), but it often feels like mere copycat attempt. The real darkness and grit of that classic are absent. The performances are good, but lean a bit over the top, with Skarsgård’s jittery, manic portrayal of Kiritsis not exactly having the endearing qualities that Van Sant intended. So, despite the film’s attempts to turn Kiritsis into some sort of folk hero, he basically still comes off as a ranting, unstable lunatic.
But, when we see the real Kiritsis during the end credits, and realize that he appears much older and wasn’t good looking like Skarsgård, the grift is fully up. To give him such a glow up seems in keeping with the theme of turning him into someone for us to root for, instead of an unstable criminal. The film’s more entertaining impulses can’t hide these attempts at slanted storytelling.
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