Review: "Dead Man's Wire"

In the film Dead Man’s Wire, a distraught man enters the office of the president of a mortgage company, taking the man hostage by attaching a wire collar around his neck.

The wire is connected to the trigger of a sawed-off shotgun just inches behind the man’s head. It’s known as a “Dead Man’s Wire.”  If the man makes a sudden movement or tries to escape, the trigger is pulled and the gun goes off, killing him instantly. 

Dead Man’s Wire. Photo Credit Stefania Rosini/Row K Entertainment

While it sounds like the stuff of a far-fetched, low budget action flick, it’s an event that actually took place back on February 8, 1977 when Tony Kiritsis (played by Bill Skarsgård) abducted Richard Hall (played by Dacre Montgomery) of the Meridian Mortgage Company in Indianapolis.

Kiritsis claimed to be the scammed victim of mortgage fraud on the brink of losing his life’s savings.  He was devastated and outraged.  He wanted revenge and justice.  Moreover, he wanted the authorities and the public to know what had happened. Besides monetary compensation, he demanded a public apology as well as official assurance that he would not be arrested or punished for his actions.

After marching his hostage out of his office building in full view of the police and a local TV crew, Kiritsis took the man back to his apartment where the tense drama would play out over the next several days.

As one might expect things didn’t go according to plan.  Though he has told the police outside his apartment building that he has wired the place with explosives, he is surrounded and outnumbered.  His plan to get a public apology from his hostage’s father (played by Al Pacino) who is out of town, vacationing in Florida, goes awry when the stubborn old man refuses, despite his son being held at gunpoint.  It’s a heartstopping moment.

Pacino’s appearance is a reminder of his classic hostage caper movie Dog Day Afternoon (1975) another true story about a desperate man who once held up a bank in order to steal the money for his lover’s sex change operation.  It was one of the best movies ever directed by the late Sidney Lumet (co-starring Pacino and the late John Cazale)

Dead Man’s Wire never reaches that level of intensity or suspense.  Dog Day Afternoon will forever be a hard act to follow.  The scene of Pacino’s character parading around in front of an army of law enforcement people and a mob of cheering bystanders chanting “At-ti-ca, At-ti-ca” still resonates in our collective consciousness. 

There is no moment like that here in Dead Man’s Wire.

Kiritsis does manage to rally support with the aid of a popular local radio DJ, Fred Temple, played by Colman Domingo.  He’s a super cool dude, not unlike the Mister Señor Love Daddy character played by Samuel L. Jackson in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing back in 1989.  It’s derivative, but it works.

The movie is a throwback to the world of 1977, beautifully shot with the inclusion of vintage-looking TV news videotape images and occasional black-and-white photographs that seem to come out of nowhere and for no apparent reason.

The news footage is of the shaky-cam variety even though the images are ostensibly shot by a normally steady-handed professional news photographer (dramatic license, one might presume).  Van Sant seems to be unfamiliar with TV News back in 1977.  A female reporter calls into the studio early on to a news director who is busy working as a studio floor manager, getting cameras and crew in place for a news broadcast. 

News Directors don't usually double as floor managers.

When news crews arrive for a hastily scheduled press announcement at night outside the apartment building, camera operators are shown moving remote cameras around on wheeled aluminum tripods.  Back then, they would have just shot on “sticks” (portable tripods without wheels).

At the end of the movie, there is videotaped news coverage from within the courtroom when the verdict is read. 

It’s all an attempt to juice-up the drama beyond the parameters of the story which is suspenseful in and of itself.  Its strength is the fact that it really happened.  Its failure is in trying to make it more than what it actually was—a tense drama about an average guy who was the devastated victim of white-collar crime and corruption, and tried to do something about it.