Directed By Gus Van Sant

Starring – Bill Skarsgard, Dacre Montgomery, Al Pacino

The Plot – On February 8, 1977, Tony Kiritsis (Skarsgard) entered the office of Richard Hall (Montgomery), president of the Meridian Mortgage Company, and took him hostage with a sawed-off shotgun wired with a “dead man’s wire” from the trigger to Tony’s own neck.

Rated R for adult language throughout

Dead Man’s Wire Trailer #1 (2026)

POSITIVES

As hard as it is to believe, this is Van Sant’s first feature length film in nearly eight years, and considering it’s a well-documented story about one of America’s gravest social injustices, there’s proof in the proverbial pudding that he felt inspired to vividly bring it to life once more, an objective that Gus totally passes with the flying colors of a boldly layered production and sprawling storytelling from many perspectives in and around this hostage situation. On the former, Van Sant effortlessly immerses himself and his presentation in the parameters of the distinctive age, featuring a grainy color grading, outdated set designs and wardrobe bleeding a familiarity in stylistic trends, and some compelling editing techniques that blend colorless photography in between the film’s most pivotal moments, in order to appraise factual legitimacy to moments that could easily come across as exaggeratedly dramaticized for cinema. Because of such a tight control on the authentic likeness of the depicted age, with Danny Elfman’s jazzy score to sensualize the senses, the film not only maintains its intended emphasis to breathe consciousness into the difficulties that law enforcement faced at overcoming Tony’s situational advantages, where technology in communications played more to a conflict than a resolution, but also allows Van Sant endless opportunity to artistically embrace a soulful style and personality that surprisingly breathes effectively with the movie’s tone, allowing plenty of room for high-stakes drama and adversarial comedy to find their ways naturally into the depths of Tony’s unforeseen obstacles that the character is forced to endure. As for the story, Austin Kolodney’s script isn’t entirely perfect, but it does appraise unlimited accessibility and insightful information from the perspective of a variety of colorful characters who each lived their own unique angles surrounding this emerging situation, ultimately keeping the consistency of the storytelling from ever feeling dryly stale or stagnantly redundant in the depths of a 100-minute runtime. For my money, the height of the movie’s momentum truly materializes during its initial opening half hour, where the design of the gun itself not only breeds an element of unpredictability to the vulnerability of the characters well-being, which also dramatically illustrates that anything could easily go wrong at any given second, but also a bit of established brilliance attached to the characterization of Tony’s erratically unrestrained emotionality, where his think-fast spontaneity allowed him to control the overwhelming adversity, despite the claustrophobic confines of Hall’s homefield advantage and the emergingly stacking police force that increases seemingly every minute. Responsibly, Kolodney doesn’t seem to justify or condemn the irresponsibly dangerous actions of Tony, instead conveying him as one of millions who feel wronged by the upper class dominance of the segregated system, and while this may or may not upset audiences seeking an intended directional depiction for how hostile characters are portrayed, I found it meaningfully connective in the ways that Austin measures Tony’s erroneous measures to the character’s own unsuppressed humanity, perhaps proving how scarily easy it could be for any one of us to lose ourselves in an intended objective, once everything has been taken from our once ambitious outlook. This is made even more glaringly apparent with Skarsgard’s masterfully complex performance as Tony, where once again the chameleon actor transforms himself emotionally and psychologically before our very eyes, with a naturally ingrained accent and mirroring speech patterns from the real-life character that makes his turn feel seamless, despite glaring differences in their overall appearances. Skarsgard brings a rampant energy of unchained anger and foolishness to Tony that at-times makes him feel simultaneously scared and scary, featuring an underlining anxiousness that makes his interactions with Montgomery feel natural yet deliberate while outlining their tepidly tender dynamic of this inescapable elephant co-existing in the room between them. Montgomery’s turn is much more thankless than Skarsgard, with so much of his scene-stealing performance relying on the boldness of facials to convey the fear and exhaustion of the character’s predicament, instead of expressive dialogue, and considering the rest of the ensemble involves a sultry and seductive vocalizing to Colman Domingo’s radio personality, a caustically firm and stoic Al Pacino, and a seamlessly disappearing Cary Elwes into a gruff police officer, it offers stirring turns aplenty to maintain the attention of the audience, allowing enough entertainment value to overcome some of the film’s inferior aspects.

NEGATIVES

Without question, the single biggest problem that this film has is a flatlining second act, where much of the movie’s momentum and the conflict’s suspense has evaporated within a section of the script that concerns itself more with outsider perspectives rather than the claustrophobic confines of Tony and Richard’s boiling conflict. As previously mentioned, I appreciate the scope of the script to ambitiously expand the story beyond the redundancy of a single stage setting, especially in ways that outsiders paint an impression of Tony before holding a bank manager hostage, however there are overlong scenes involving the strategizing of law enforcement, the media’s skepticism with broadcasting such an unpredictable character, and even a fake-out dream sequence for Richard, that grinds the movie’s pacing to a screeching halt, at a time when urgency is needed to take the storytelling across three days of developments, eviscerating a lot of the tension out of the dynamic of Tony and Richard, especially alongside a first and third act riveting with inevitability. There is an attempt to dangle hope to Richard, in the form of an unclaimed firearm, but it’s a temporary tease that really goes nowhere in the grand scheme of things, making me wish more of those escapist opportunities presented themselves to Richard, particularly the abundance of vulnerable moments that he spends isolated away from both Tony and the camera. On top of this, my other significant problem that I had with the film pertained to a complete lack of social commentary conjured from the script’s occasional observational exploits about the growing distrust of financial institutions, the rise of vulture capitalism, and the shifting role that media plays at presenting the story. While each of these elements offers a stirring conversation alongside Tony’s own vitriolic vengeance to the dog-eat-dog actions that cost him everything, even so much as surmising some scintillating questions about how little has changed about them in the nearly fifty years that has passed, the script doesn’t have the persisting pursuit to tackle them in ways that make them an intricately alluring element to the dissection of this complex conflict, where matters fit comfortably into singularly dimensional outlining, instead of rocking the boat with an exploration to find a cause for such turbulence. Are the bank greedy bloodsuckers? Is Tony liable for bouncing his loan with repeated late payments? Is it personal between Tony and the Hall family? All great questions, with very little expansion, leaving a tethered irresponsibility among Van Sant and Kolodney to tackle the more fascinating components of the script, instead of those firmly documented many decades ago.

OVERALL
“Dead Man’s Wire” is a captivatingly chaotic and sobering crime drama about the limitless depths that a disillusioned man with nothing left to lose will enact, in order to seek the redemptive justice that he believes himself to be worthy of. Led by Bill Skarsgard’s powerhouse performance and a stellar recreation of 1977 in Gus Van Sant’s sleekly stylistic production, the film overcomes the tumbles of a tumultuous second act and surface level commentary to stick the landing with its jaw-dropping climax, offering thrills, chills and unforeseen laughter to Van Sant’s cinematic comeback, nearly eight years in the making

My Grade: 7.3 or B-