A Good Enough Movie But How Honest Is It ?

Rating: 7/10 (1 August 2005)

This follows a true life incident where two characters called Sonny and Sal rob a bank in New York . Luckily Sonny used to work in a bank because this means that he knows all the tricks like if you use a certain key it'll trip the alarm in the vault and if you take all the notes from a register this too will raise the alarm . Yeah Sonny knows his stuff so why then I wondered did he and his colleagues wear masks ? As his other accomplice gets cold feet why does he continually call him " Stevie " in front of the hostage opening the door and keep calling his partner " Sal " in front of everyone ? Is there anything more incompetent than criminals calling each other by their names while robbing people ? This tends to contradict Sonny as being a pre meditated robber and paints him more as a lovable klutz doomed to failure
This is my major problem with DOG DAY AFTERNOON . It's a film that unreservedly manipulates the audience into feeling great pity for Sonny and Sal . I don't like being manipulated . It's this lack of ambiguity that stops DDA from being one of the best movies from the 1970s and I doubt if the real life characters would recognise themselves as the people in this movie and I feel too much artistic license has been taken with a bizarre true life story
To be fair it's an entertaining and well made film . Sidney Lumet does as good a job here as he did in THE ANDERSON TAPES but it's the performances that really stand out . Al Pacino is the best American character actor of the last quarter of the 20th century and he keeps up his very high standards here but it's an unrecognisable John Cazale who steals the acting show with his very understated performance as Sal