This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Based On a True Story
Plot Overview
Since he was a kid
slinging ice cream Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) has
always been a hard, blue collar worker perpetually poor. He's now
branched out into a real estate venture by which he purchased
17 acres of prime land, cleared it, obtained permits, and has
sold his idea of a shopping center to his first client—more
will follow—a grocery store. Suddenly, though, the Meridian
Mortgage Company has pulled the plug by foreclosing on him for
lack of a middling payment or two. Miffed, he makes an
appointment with the loan company's owner M.L. Hall (Al
Pacino.) It looks to Tony to be a scam not dissimilar to one
described by author Kurt Vonnegut:
The substance was coming from the Barrytron plant. … ¶Barrytron had no idea it was dumping this waste into Sugar Creek. They had hired the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company, which was gangster-controlled, to build a system to get rid of the waste. They knew the company was gangster-controlled. Everybody knew that. But the Maritimo Brothers were usually the best builders in town.—But every so often they would do something amazingly criminal. The Barrytron disposal system was a case in point. It was expensive and it appeared to be complicated and busy. Actually, though, it was old junk hooked up every which way, concealing a straight run of stolen sewer pipe running directly from Barrytron to Sugar Creek. (476)
Tony understands that he's been
deliberately trapped. The loan company knew full well he would
default on their loan by and by; he was so poor. They wanted the
lot to go directly to a developer they had in mind, one with a
proven track record, after Tony put in the labor & resources to
set it up. Tony comes armed to his interview with the big guy,
at which time the movie opens in medias res.
Ideology
Tony arrives carrying a long box only to be told by
the secretary that the main man is out of town. She sends him to
his son VP Richard Hall
(Dacre Montgomery) whom he takes captive and leads
outside on a dead man's leash.
An ancillary plot is developed where neophyte TV reporter Linda Page (Myha'la) is
johnny-on-the-spot with her cameraman when they catch the police
call. She phones the station who decides to send one of their
seasoned reporters to cover it. The implication is she's been
passed over for being a woman not a chief breadwinner per se.
She gives them a false lead on the gunman's stated destination so
she can get the real story regardless. Perhaps that wasn't ethical,
but it's small potatoes compared to Tony the armed kidnapper.
In his negotiations it's determined
that Tony is single with “no mouths to feed.” The
company might have been more flexible if he'd been a family man,
but as he tells it, “My business is my kids.” As wise
Solomon puts it, (Eccl. 4:8)
“There is one alone, and there is not a second; yea, he hath
neither child nor brother: yet is there no end of all his labour;
neither is his eye satisfied with riches; neither saith he, For
whom do I labour, and bereave my soul of good? This is also vanity,
yea, it is a sore travail.” Tony does have a (fat) brother,
but they're not close. The company's president says he'll grieve if
one of his son's dies. His hostage son has a worried wife at home.
Even the radio DJ Fred
Temple (Colman Domingo) covering the drama misses his home-cooked
dinner and necessary beauty sleep to broadcast the
developments. Being a regular family man counts for
something in the sympathy department.
The police say, “He's out of
control,” but the FBI agent disagrees saying he's very much
in control and gives an outline of his actions on a blackboard
to prove his point. Tony needs to moderate his protest a tad. He
falls short in the area of temperance of which self-control is but
a part. The KJV of 1611 enjoined temperance in, Acts 24:24-25, 1Cor.
9:25, Gal. 5:23, Titus 1:7-8, Titus
2:2, and 2Peter 1:5-6. When
the KJV was (needlessly in my opinion) updated by the ASV in 1901,
temperance was left in. Nevertheless, it has
been reinterpreted by many modern Bible translators as
self-control so as not to confuse the regular joes who
since Prohibition in the 1920's came to regard temperance as
applicable only to drink. My Concise Thesaurus has “sober
adj. temperate. A person who is sober is not drunk. A temperate person exercises
moderation and self-restraint and for that reason is unlikely to
drink to excess.” (170) Modern Protestant Bibles such as the
RSV (1952), and later NKJV, ESV & NIV now read “self-control” where they used to read “temperance.”
For word selection illustration, I quote California Gov. Gavin Newsom who in a March, 2024
interview extolled President Biden, saying: “We have American
manufacturing coming back home, all because of Biden's wisdom,
because of his temperance, his capacity to lead in a bipartisan
manner—” Bipartisan leadership is by nature
temperate. The Jubilee 2000 Bible still uses
temperance. It's valid for more than just drink.
According to Porter G. Perrin, Index to English:
The Meaning of Words 3b. Synonyms. A synonym is a word
of nearly the same meaning as another. … There are very
few pairs of interchangeable words.
(192) And
according to Fowler, “Synonyms, in the narrowest
sense, are separate words whose meaning, both denotation &
connotation, is so fully identical that one can always be
substituted for the other without change in the effect of the
sentence in which it is done. Whether any such perfect synonyms
exist is doubtful.” According to Professor George P. Marsh in
an 1859 postgraduate lecture on the English Bible of 1611:
“Words and ideas are so inseparably connected, they become in
a sense connatural, that we cannot change the one without
modifying the other. … A new translation of the Bible,
therefore, or an essential modification of the existing [KJV] version,
is substantially a new book, a new Bible, another revelation.”
(454)
I routinely watch movie crime capers on a Friday night. The criminals exercise exquisite self-control on their jobs. Then I was going to church on Sunday where their updated Bibles for the liturgy substitute “self-control” where mine still reads, (Gal. 5:22-23) “But the fruit of the Spirit is … temperance: against such there is no law.” There certainly was law against the criminals' self-control for their crime. Somehow, the congregants used a kind of mental gymnastics to get around the malapropism, but it didn't set well with me, so I changed my place of worship.
Eventually society settles its score with mad Tony, and the preacher quotes, (Psalm 51:7) “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” He'll get as fair a shake as possible under the circumstances.
Production Values
“” (2025) was set in Indianapolis over the duration of three days in February of 1977. It was directed by Gus Van Sant. Its script was by Austin Kolodney. It stars Dacre Montgomery, Bill Skarsgård and Al Pacino. The acting was all fairly good. Pacino hammed it up a bit, but he could get away with it. Myha'la a negress had good screen presence. Colman Domingo a negro playing a laid back DJ could get a radio job anywhere … except where white nationalists rule, of course.
MPA rated it R for language throughout. Modern cameras were well utilized in this docudrama that interspersed flash clips from original news footage. The story was developed along the hostage & taker line as well as of worried public & police. It's pretty much a given that it will end well, but it was a trip. Runtime is 1¾ hours.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
A hopeful verse of scripture was quoted
(twice) and there was some praying going on but not so as one would
notice. There was a good cross section of people documented here.
Other than old style portable telephones and automobiles,
it looked like a modern setting. It works well as a docudrama
but hasn't as much action as other police fare.
Movie Ratings
Action Factor: Weak action scenes. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Average special effects. Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day. Suspense: Keeps you on the edge of your seat. Overall movie rating: Three and a half stars out of five.
Works Cited
Unless otherwise noted Bible quotations are from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software.
Biden, Joe. Quoted from Jack Birle's article, “Gavin Newsom calls Biden's age a ‘gift’ rather than a liability.” In The Washington Examiner. Web.
Fowler, H.W., A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. USA: Oxford UP. 1946. Print.
Marsh, George P.
“Disturbance of Formulas.”
Lectures on the English
Language. London: John Murray, 1863. Print.
——available to
read or download at www.bibles.n7nz.org.
Perrin, Porter G. Index to English. Chicago: Scott, Foresman & Co., 1939. Print.
The Right Word II. A Concise Thesaurus. Based on the New American Heritage Dictionary. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1983. Print.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions, copyright © 1973 by Kurt Vonnegut. Appearing in Three Complete Novels. New York: Wings Books, 1995. Print.
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