Dead Man’s Wire: Bill Skarsgård on a Hair-Trigger Edge
Gus Van Sant revives a stranger-than-fiction ’70s hostage standoff with jittery energy, dark humor, and period grit.
The ’70s-set hostage thriller Dead Man’s Wire moves with a lightness and swiftness that belies the volatile life-or-death standoff at its center.
Directed by Gus Van Sant, the film has a pep in its step, an eagerness to relay the stranger-than-fiction true crime story of Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård), a wronged man who seeks retribution for his financial downfall by taking hostage one of the men he deems responsible, mortgage broker Dick Hall (Dacre Montgomery).
Portrayed by Skarsgård as a jumble of righteous anger and jangled nerves, Kiritsis strolls into Hall’s office in downtown Indianapolis one morning in 1977 and seizes him with a sawed-off shotgun that he hangs around Hall’s neck, pointed at his head, attached to a tripwire designed to pull the trigger if Hall attempts escape or if Kiritsis lets go.
With the dead man’s wire in place, Kiritsis kidnaps Hall and holds off the police, while expressing his rage to the world through on-air calls to Fred Temple, his favorite radio DJ. Played as smooth as you’d like by Colman Domingo, Temple, “the Voice of Indianapolis,” tries to keep Kiritis cool as the hostage situation heats up.
Meanwhile, bright-eyed local TV news reporter Linda Page (an appealing turn by Industry breakout Myha’la) tries to stay ahead of the media swarm chasing the story as it becomes a sensation.
The movie’s poster touts this shotgun-powered spectacle as “the true story that held a nation hostage,” which might be news to you or me. I grew up a couple hours down the interstate from Indy and I haven’t talked to anybody who remembers this happening.
But Van Sant, who’s helmed a few fascinating takes on biographical events, from Milk to Drugstore Cowboy, effectively signals we’re watching something that really went down. He and cinematographer Arnaud Potier whip out various film stocks and video formats, and even still photography, to evoke the period, and add to the tension and immediacy of a crime captured in the moment (with shoot location Louisville standing in for Indianapolis).
The film integrates actual news footage, and brings to life photographer John Blair’s stunning Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Kiritsis holding Hall at gunpoint surrounded by news crews and law enforcement. Buoyed by right-on costume and production design, the movie blurs the line between actual images of that day and cinematic recreation — so, as wild as this situation gets, it generally feels credible.
A good deal of that credibility is owed to Skarsgård and Montgomery, whose charged captor-hostage interaction maintains suspense in this pressure-cooker, while also adding dashes of dark humor. Liberated from the makeup and prosthetics of his famed roles in It and Nosferatu, Skarsgård excels as a downtrodden everyman who’s not a craven criminal but simply mad as hell and can’t take it anymore.
The script by Austin Kolodney — developed with an assist from documentarians Alan Berry and Mark Enochs, who covered these events in the 2018 documentary Dead Man’s Line — lays out a compelling, class-conscious case for Kiritsis. He claims that Meridian Mortgage Company, through president Dick Hall and company owner M.L. Hall, Dick’s dad, loaned him money for a real estate purchase that they then screwed him on, forcing him to sell at a loss, buried in interest debt to Meridian.
In fact, Kiritsis shows up at Meridian that day intending to kidnap the big boss, M.L., portrayed by none other than Al Pacino. But M.L. is out of the office on vacation. Still, Kiritsis negotiates to get M.L. on the phone at his sunny resort, so it’s fair to say that Pacino phones in his performance, which is not to say he’s not good.
The Oscar-winning legend is amusing in the role of this purely unscrupulous money man, though he looks like he might also have been on vacation when they shot his handful of scenes. Domingo likewise lends gravitas and ’70s cool to the proceedings but doesn’t appear too challenged by the underwritten role of on-air commentator.
Beyond the pair wired to the shotgun, all the characters tend towards one-note, amusing or not. The film’s thick air of tension dissipates when it strays too long from the main event. Fortunately, Dead Man’s Wire largely locks in on what’s working in its frantic, fearful vision of a man sunk by someone else’s greed, pulling the trigger on his last resort.
Dead Man’s Wire (★★★☆☆) is playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
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