If a great director releases a film in January and no one is around to see it, does it even make a sound? Not to talk around, rather than about, award-winning helmer Gus Van Sant’s first feature in eight years, but the silence engulfing movie is deafening. Likely scared off by the pitiful box office performance of adult dramas throughout Fall 2025, Row K Entertainment decided to cut their losses rather than make an award season pitch last year, dispatching of their wares in the middle of 2026’s first month. It’s called Dumpuary for those in the know, a 31 day stretch in which studios release every project they’re unsure of like a batch of unacknowledged tax write-offs. This land of curios, knuckleheads, and unintentional comedies works well as a palette cleanser after weeks upon weeks of Oscar bait, a context that makes the secreted inclusion of Dead Man’s Wire all the more disheartening. Plaudits may have been out of reach, but this one’s neither faceplant nor enigma. It’s just out of fashion.

That’s a strange way to describe anything with such an evergreen premise, but the (multiplex) times, they are a-changin.’ A similar shifting of tectonic plates is happening beneath the feet of Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård), a middle class resident of 1970’s Indianapolis who’s had it up to here with corporate America’s greedy incursion on the common folks’ way of life. Having been cheated by local mortgage broker M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), Kiritsis takes matters into his own hands, kidnapping his enemy’s son, Richard (Dacre Montgomery), with the aid of the titular, jerryrigged shotgun. His demands, which include financial compensation and a public apology, are simply too lofty for a man of Hall’s stature to abide, resulting in a days-long stand off that comes to involve everyone from the FBI to the national media, somehow ensnaring Tony’s favorite disc jockey, Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), in its chaotic whirling dervish.

Comparisons to Dog Day Afternoon aren’t so much incisive as unavoidable, but really, there’s nothing new under Van Sant’s sun here. Austin Kolodney’s screenplay has no shortage of antecedents, and he’s loath to fix what isn’t broken, even if it saps his narrative of anything resembling surprise. There’s comfort in locking into a movie with such established parameters, even if you know where Dead Man’s Wire is going, as well as most of the stops along the way. The stakes, however familiar, are enticingly high, bolted into the ceiling fixture by the steady appeal of watching monied overlords being whittled down to size. From All the President’s Men to Star Wars, the approach always works, and the rudimentary building blocks of storytelling remain undefeated.

Same goes for just about any excuse to drift back into the 70’s, a decade synonymous with agitated big screen excellence. An instance of form effortlessly flowing out of function, Wire doesn’t just act like a lost artifact of the New Hollywood, it looks and sounds like one too. Credit Arnaud Potier’s itchy, grainy cinematography or Peggy Schnitzer’s hyper-specific costuming all you want, but this is more of a ‘whole being greater than the sum of the parts’ situation. Production Designer Stefan Dechant is just as tuned into the wavelength, his glowering building exteriors and dingy streets, combined with an abundance of below-the-line excellence, buckling you into the DeLorean and gunnning it to 88 mph. Any fully-realized cinematic jaunt to this particular period is worth taking, a reminder of yesteryear’s celluloid tenacity of which the actors here are all too aware.

Leading the charge is Skarsgård, who’s never been afforded this level of real-life scenery chewing before. Sure, anyone famous for playing Pennywise and Nosferatu has indulged in his share of histrionics, but affixing them to a sweat-drenched, bug-eyed everyman is a whole different ballgame. He swings accordingly, using tools both big and wild to carve out something surprisingly soulful, recalling the loftiest feats of his character’s aforementioned antagonist. Pacino might have little to do here beyond ridiculing Kiritsis through the phone, but his attendance makes for a passing of the spiritual baton, handing the tortured-male archetype he helped forge off to the next generation, and shuffling out of their way. Domingo is culling from a separate lineage, though his placid expression and the smooth, drawling bass provide the other side of the 70’s coin. Montgomery makes for a sturdy scene partner, but this is really Skarsgård and Domingo’s show, fully committed to a strand of rebel-rousing, crowd pleasing entertainment that Tinsel Town is apparently done making.

Praising Dead Man’s Wire, past a certain point at least, risks being disingenuous. Both based on a true story and assembled from borrowed parts, the movie knowingly abandons any and all pursuits of greatness, but when studios are so callously content with releasing serialized junk, undeniable competency shouldn’t be met with the sound of crickets. It’s the same unnerving sound that greeted Van Sant’s previous picture, 2018’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, and while that movie’s interest in addiction recovery is nowhere to be found in Wire, the two are twinned as arguments in favor of a more dependable, lower key way of handling business. The relationship doesn’t end there; both were also fiscal flops that seem unlikely to pick up steam on your favorite streamer, pushed to the back of the line by reality shows and mystery box appeasements. Their lack of accoutrements makes them the counterintuitive outlier, fighting for attention in landscape that’s beholden to boilerplate largess. No one seems to know what to do anymore with a flick that’s satisfied with just being good; might as well send it out with the trash.