In Review: ‘Dead Man’s Wire,’ ‘Primate’

Dead Man’s Wire
Dir. Gus Van Sant
105 min.

Providing a sense of urgency would seem to be the easiest part of directing Dead Man’s Wire, a crime thriller based on a 63-hour standoff in 1977 Indianapolis, when Tony Kiritsis held a mortgage executive hostage and brought his grievances to a television audience. There’s tension inherent in any situation of this kind, but the manner in which Kiritsis threatened his captive, referenced by the title, is particularly unsettling: To hold the authorities at bay, Kiritsis attached a wire connecting his sawed-off shotgun to the victim’s neck, so the trigger would automatically fire if the wire was pulled in the wrong direction. The potential for this jury-rigged contraption to misfire seems extremely high even before considering Kiritsis’ emotional volatility, which must have deepened as the hours passed and anger and exhaustion clouded his judgment. 

And yet, Dead Man’s Wire is a curious shrug of a movie, especially from a director like Gus Van Sant, who has picked up some ho-hum work-for-hire assignments in the past, such as Finding Forrester or Promised Land, but usually puts some more spin on the ball. Here, Van Sant seems content mostly to evoke the feel of a nondescript Midwestern city in the late ’70s while adopting the style of a straightforward docudrama, mimicking the look of era-specific local-news footage. The similarities to Dog Day Afternoon, another fact-based ’70s crime thriller about the desperate actions of an underdog, are so obvious that Van Sant has cast Al Pacino in a plum supporting role. But to invite comparison to a classic so explicitly is about as perilous an idea as wiring up a shotgun. 

Perhaps the most glaring problem with Dead Man’s Wire is the casting of Bill Skarsgård, a Swedish actor who’s played unnerving loners and monsters to great effect in films like Barbarian and Nosferatu, but doesn’t suggest a guy from the Midwest. On a sunny winter day in Indianapolis, his Kiritsis slips into the offices of a mortgage company and emerges with a gun wired to the neck of Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery), the son of a prominent broker (Pacino) that Kiritsis blames for ruining his life. According to Kiritsis, the Halls had deliberately swiped away a property he’d mortgaged from them when they realized that it might have serious value. In his negotiations with the police, Kiritsis wants his side of the story told to the public at large, along with compensation and an apology from the Halls for ripping him off. 

There’s little reason to believe that Kiritsis’ gripe has no basis in fact, which offers Dead Man’s Wire the possibility of a made-for-TV populist hero along the lines of Luigi Mangione, whose alleged killing of a health care executive last year earned him an unexpected cult following. But Skarsgård doesn’t project that level of magnetism and the details of Kiritsis’ dealings with the Halls are too murky to raise the stakes, which is definitively not the case in a film like Dog Day Afternoon. That leaves Van Sant to fiddle around with ancillary characters who wind up siphoning away the tension, like the always-excellent Colman Domingo as a radio DJ that Kritisis deploys as an intermediary and Industry’s Myha’la as a local reporter angling for her first big scoop. There’s plenty of period flavor to Dead Man’s Wire, especially in the eclectic soundtrack, but not much bite. — Scott Tobias

Dead Man's Wire opens in limited release tomorrow.

Primate
Dir. Johannes Roberts
89 min.

It’s hard out there for a chimp, though Ben, the chimp at the center of Primate, seems to have had it easier than most. Raised by a linguistics researcher, who helped develop his ability to communicate with humans, Ben’s remained a beloved part of her family even after her death. He’s a kind of fur-covered son to Adam (Troy Kotsur), a hearing-impaired author of bestselling thrillers, and quasi-sibling to Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) and her younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter). In fact, when Lucy returns home to the isolated, cliffside Hawaiian home they all share, she gets a warmer greeting from Ben than Erin, who’s annoyed that Lucy’s left her behind for college life on the mainland.

Got all that? If not, don’t worry, because virtually none of it matters once Primate kicks into gear after some of Lucy’s friends show up for a sleepover. Ben, it seems, has developed a case of rabies. (That Hawaii is the only American state in which rabies has no presence mostly gets handwaved away.) This turns him into a tireless murder demon whose intelligence becomes a liability for everyone around him. There’s an alternate version of Primate in which Ben serves as a kind of tragic hero wrestling with his love for his human companions and the disease eating away at his brain, a sort of simian Cujo. Perhaps rightly sensing that this would be incredibly depressing, director Johannes Roberts has opted instead to make a slasher movie in which a crazy chimp takes out one teen after another. An isolated locale, some cool practical effects, and a lot of gore, that ought to be enough, right?

Well, sometimes it is. Roberts skillfully stages some memorable kills but, despite the unusual antagonist, Primate too often feels like a by-the-numbers slasher that expects the novelty of a bloodthirsty chimp will carry it. But that doesn’t make up for the flat characters or the film’s inability to figure out exactly what kind of villain Ben is supposed to be. Primate’s too timid to cross fully over into camp, but by the end, Ben has essentially become Chucky without the ability to crack wise apart from a soundboard that allows him to form phrases like “LUCY. BAD.” In that spirit: PRIMATE. MERELY. O.K. —Keith Phipps

Primate swings into theaters everywhere tonight.