On the morning of February 8, 1977, Tony Kiritsis, who felt cheated by his bankers, entered the Meridian Mortgage Company in Indianapolis. There he overpowered Richard Hall, the son of the company president, and attached a sawn-off 12-gauge shotgun with a special wire frame not only on the neck of his victim, but also to his own body. Such an amateur -like construction is also called “Dead Man's Wire”, because if the perpetrator falls to the ground by snipers, for example, the victim is also shot. This was followed by a 63-hour hostage-taking, in which the evil-banker tirades by Tony Kiritsis were sometimes broadcast live on radio and television.
The spectacular story was to be filmed in 2018, with Werner Herzog as director and Nicolas Cage as the main actor. Anyone who saw the first cooperation between the two, “Bad Lieutenant – Cop without Conscience”, who suspects what a livelihood was probably out. Instead, seven years later there is now the film adaptation of “Good Will Hunting” director Gus van Sant, who is by no means so serious, but serves “Dead Man's Wire” as a smugly crime comedy with a calculated contrast-the-die da-stone gesture and thickly applied seventies. This is entertaining enough, but we continue to mourn the Werner-Herzog version.
Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) put a lot of time into his equipment, which serves as a kind of life insurance for him during the hostage -taking.
Bill Skarsgård (PennyWise from “Es”) is not only ten years younger than the real Tony Kiritsis, but also ten times as sexy with his 1970s. For weeks he planned the hostage -taking – and yet it is somehow cute how it fails when operating the radio device from a stolen police car and instead turns on the siren again and again. In the film, the mostly abstruse conspiracy of the model, which has been swept around for 28 minutes in a row, has only been so much left in the film that a certain Robin-Hood myth does not immediately coincide.
And when we see for the first time the president of Meridian Mortgage, embodied by show-off Al Pacino, who lets a burrito go back on the Florida luxury vacation because he was halved instead of being in front, it is finally clear which side you stand on. At the credits, “The Revolution wants not to be televised”, and of course that is meant ironically, after Kiritsi's little man uprising has just just ensured that even John Waynes was interrupted Ehren-Oscar-Dankes speech in order to switch to the hostage-taking instead. Gus van Sant and the Bill Skarsgård, which was also involved as a producer, hardly hold behind the mountain with their sympathy.
Not unproblematic, but …
Nine years after pizza and nine months after the pharmaceutical CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan was shot on the open street, but quite a few sympathies were after the five-day later suspected suspected Luigi Mangione, this attitude is at least plump, if not. But you don't want to be more papal than the Pope, especially where the events were almost half a century ago – and then you have to admit that with “Dead Man's Wire” you can have a good time on a superficial level:
Bill Skarsgård (“The Crow”), as always, gives everything (with which he still has a reserved effect compared to his real model, as we see in direct comparison in the original videos that are established at the end). In his very limited appearances, Oscar winner Al Pacino is wonderfully greasy and Colman Domingo (most recently Oscarnominated for “Rustin” and “Sing Sing”) was born with his sexy-deep voice to embody a radio presenter.
In addition, like “September 5”, “Dead Man's Wire” delivers a lot of seventy feeling-from the detailed furnishings of offices, apartments and TV studios to the long since not so professional police work. This shows when Tony simply marches along the streets with the homemade, title-giving device and even marches through the cop battalions that put themselves in the way. You can find that funny, clever or even cool, but the abdominal pain does not completely disappear.
Conclusion: You could certainly have tackled the original story very differently, but if you already choose a comfortable crime comedy, then Gus van Sant will certainly not do the worst job with “Dead Man's Wire”.
We saw “Dead Man's Wire” at the Venice Film Festival 2025, where he celebrated his world premiere out of competition.