Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Sonny	Al Pacino
Sal	John Cazale
Moretti	Charles Durning
Leon	Chris Sarandon	½
Murphy	Lance Henriksen

Review

This comedy is most of all a contemporary social satire of useful effect. It is a brilliant document of 1970s New York and of the uprising of media as a powerful force, and it captures a few hilarious illustrations in that respect. But that is also about everything this film has to offer. Al Pacino's performance is a potential powerhouse, but his character is - behind all its absurdness – ultimately tedious and unexplored. Lumet gets his point through (thoroughly) when trying to be satirical, but he's far off when trying to create engaging dramatic relations between too many characters that are all in the same state of mind. The Freudian approach gets a bit clichéd, and the promising introduction of the Leon character is wasted by the long-winded and dramatically static middle part of the film. Not until a very fine finish can Dog Day Afternoon boast any kind of suspense, but by then it has wasted its fine premise on too many infertile dialogues and sequences.

Sitater

Sonny: "So what country do you wanna go to?"
Sal: "Wyoming!"
Sonny: "Sal, Wyoming's not a country!"