Like the commenter from Harbin said: "Good Movie, Bad Message".

Rating: 5/10 (10 July 2008)

Several messages, actually, all of them bad.
As an old-line Marxist, director Lumet is a stalwart partisan of the working class-- theoretically. Yet Bath Beach in Brooklyn, NY, an actual working class neighborhood where the movie is set, is depicted as a disorderly community of layabouts and hooligans, solidly on the side of the bank robbers, who try to keep the police from doing their job.
Perhaps it is because Bath Beach is a **white** neighborhood that it is so negatively depicted by the politically correct.
Not that Lumet is any friend of the forces of order, either. If the thoroughly anti-police "Serpico" and "The Anderson Tapes" didn't make this director's views clear enough, note here how the F.B.I. agents are shown as treacherous, evil men because they quickly and professionally bring to an end a dangerous situation which the local police struggled with for ten hours without a resolution.
Maybe Hollywood wasn't trying to sneak in some pro-gay propaganda, but Sid Lumet certainly was. The character Sonny, sympathetically played by Lumet regular Al Pacino, neither acts nor sounds homosexual. You do not have a clue that he is gay until a good half way in the movie when the motive for the bank robbery is revealed. This subtle bias takes up the theme begun in the earlier "Anderson Tapes", where a prior physical relationship between the Sean Connery hero and a very young Christopher Walken is suggested.
Made in the mid seventies, this picture embodies the sixties in its alienated social attitudes. See how Lumet has the all white crowd absurdly shouting "Attica! Attica!" to show his own sympathy for the rioting convicts at that upstate prison whose murdering of every white person they could reach, guards and fellow inmates, was ended only by police gunfire.