In February, 1977, a man walked into an office and kidnapped his mortgage broker, took him back to his apartment, rigged with explosives, and held him at the point of a shotgun for days. Gus Van Sant dramatised the events in 2026's Dead Man's Wire. It's a movie filled with tension and suspense with a good performance from Bill Skarsgard as the kidnapper, Tony Kiritsis.
Tony wants to kidnap the owner of the company, M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), but the big man's on vacation, so he takes Hall's son, Richard (Dacre Montgomery) out into the street. He puts the "dead man's wire" around his own neck and Richard's, so if anyone tries to stop them as they walk from the office to Tony's apartment, the shotgun will go off, killing Richard. They're confronted by a cop, Mike Grable, played by Cary Elwes with a gruff, conspicuous affect. It turns out he's an acquaintance of Tony's and can't believe the man would do such a thing.
Tony had bought a 17 acre property through the mortgage company with the idea of turning it into a shopping centre. After Tony was unable to attract investors and developers, he was unable to keep up mortgage payments and the company took the land back. He decided it was all due to a conspiracy on the company's part to flip the land, which had become more valuable, and turn a profit.
Despite Skarsgard being best known for playing movie monsters at this point, he and Van Sant frame Tony sympathetically. Perhaps there is some moral greyness to Tony's situation but it looks pretty cut and dried to me. A lot of guys have Tony's kind of luck who don't threaten to murder anyone over it. It's insane, so I guess it makes sense he was found not-guilty by reason of insanity. I wonder if the trial would've gone differently if he'd accidentally blown Richard's head off. The movie leaves you with questions, which I appreciated.
Dead Man's Wire is available on Netflix.
No comments:
Post a Comment