Dead Man's Wire Review

Most people don't have the time, money, or energy to watch many movies, so when you do get a chance to watch something, you want it to be worthwhile. That's why Rotten Tomatoes exists: to give a snapshot of whether a movie is worth your time. But does it always work? I'll be watching all of Rotten Tomatoes’ Certified Fresh movies from this Wikipedia list, and we'll see if these movies are really worth the hype.

Movie 11 of 2026:

Dead Man’s Wire, directed by Gus Van Sant, is based on a 1977 incident where disgruntled Tony Kiritsis kidnaps the son of a mortgage broker who ripped him off. Bill Skarsgård is our lead, Tony, with Dacre Montgomery playing the kidnapped Richard. I had never heard of this situation before, so it was pretty interesting to see roughly what happened.

The biggest high point here was Skarsgård’s unhinged performance. He was so funny and so erratic, but still brought a lot of genuine heart to the character. I always fully understood his motivations, which I believe could be difficult with a character like this. He honestly had me rooting for him at the end.

Montgomery also brought a lot of humanity to Richard. It's difficult to make the straight man to our unhinged protagonist compelling, and he did that very well. A standout scene was when Tony is trying to get an apology from Richard's dad, played by Al Pacino, and you can see a lot about his backstory with his dad just in his eyes.

This movie was also very visually interesting. It really made me feel like I was in 1977, from the costumes to the production design. I appreciated when a shot would mimic the shots from the news coverage. It actually made me curious to see what that actually looked like and if the shots were spot on, and I think they were. 

My biggest critique is that we were introduced to a lot of side characters, like Myha’la’s journalist and Coleman Domingo's radio personality, but we didn't spend much time with them. This is one of the few movies that I think could have benefited from a longer run time. It seemed like some of those threads ended up not really going anywhere in favor of spending more time with our main duo. However, that was the main point of the movie, so I don't think it really dragged the whole thing down.

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 91%

Is it worth the hype?:

It is! An incredibly unhinged Bill Skarsgård steals the show. The design elements really brought me into 1977. The story was fun, but also felt extremely timely. Give this one a shot, especially if you've never heard of this story before.